Quite cool actually!
Geomerics Reveals Real-Time Radiosity
Geomerics today unveiled the first glimpse of their revolutionary new technology allowing real-time radiosity in videogames utilising commodity graphics processing hardware.
Further details, including screenshots and movies, can be found on the Geomerics lighting page.
http://www.geomerics.com/index.php?page=lighting
Too bad there's no informtation on the page on how they accomplish this. It's impossible to tell whether or not the method is suitable for realtime use. Their claim of 100hz is useless without an actual demo with characters in an actual environment at the level of detail needed for a real game.
Hopefully though, this is all it's cracked up to be, and not patented. Radiosity though, is expensive. They say infinite light source bounces, but that's sounds like BS to me. As far as I know, each bounce would require another render, or at least another calculation in a shader, even if they've found a way to accelerate the process by deteremining for each point ahead of time all the texels which contribute to its brightness. I don't see any other way to do it. You have to know how much light surface A has falling on it before you can calculate how much of that light is contributing to the illumination of surface B.
Hmm.. personally I thought the wavelet PRT looked much more impressive. Would be nice to see a video of that in action instead of just the three screenies at the bottom.
That one room is as much as their system can handle. Otherwise, they would have made a better demo.
I only would say: Realtime graphics are not improving! ;O)
Actually i think it looks pretty soft and warm. Let's wait some years and after the next energy pollution chips we will face some multicore designs and who knows if after that time is already ready for some raytracing chips...
Well it's not. This is just an interesting trick. It will be ten years before a large outdoors scene can be rendered like that.
I think they used that room for its colored walls.
Anyhoo - it said that it needed to be pre-calculated for every texel in the scene, so I don't see it being useful on moving characters and stuff.
Static geometry might be great though.
Anyone see the similarity with Crysis' "ambient mapping" from the demo?
These guys seems to be doing a pretty good job though.
http://www.fantasylab.com/newPages/Welcome.html It never ceases to amaze me how the graphics industry advertises their "realism" with fairies and ogres.
Aside from that, it does look good.
As I recall RUNE had a real time TORCH that you could use to light the darkness... is this what you are addressing?