New real-time lighting tech promises to revolutionize gaming

Based on “Geometric Algebra” it claims to do real-time radiosity and is said to be released for game consoles in time for GDC in March.

http://www.geomerics.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=3&cntnt01origid=15&cntnt01returnid=39

The videos look nice.

http://www.geomerics.com/index.php?page=lighting

Any hardcore code guys want to do a plug-in? :lol:

For those mathematically inclined, here is some background material:

http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/publications/ps/dll_millen.pdf

And Hestenes’ Oersted Medal lecture:
http://modelingnts.la.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf

It seems like they have created some kind of GA SDK, with various applications. This has piqued my curiosity. :wink:

That is really cool! I wonder how well that engine handles large polysets.

Cheers,

Gary

Does it only work with a large and powerful collection of primitives? From what the site says that seems likely. I have always thought radiosity would be awesome in realtime rendering.

Mind you don’t trip over the hype, realtime radiosity has been around for a while:

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/nickamy/realtimerad/realtimerad.html

Cheers,

Luis.

In the time since posting this (can it really be 2 years?) it looks like they’ve posted new videos, and have game console support some clients in the bag.

Here’s one from the GDC:

Awesome lighting for me has always been a major challenge in real-time. I wonder how much impact this technology will have (and whether such a thing is on the Unity scope)… :slight_smile:

Then there’s Lightsprint and Fantasy Lab’s renderer. I evaluated Lightsprint for a while last year and from what limited things I was able to do, it was a fantastic technology. Extremely fast and the hacky stuff I threw together came out better than I expected. The guy behind it is super nice as well. I talked to the folks at UT about it, but it looks like all of these would require source access and some pretty heavy internal modifications.