Instant indirect illumination for dynamic mixed reality scenes

For seamless integration of virtual content into real scenes, realizing mutual global lighting effects between both worlds belongs to the most important and challenging goals. Therefore, plenty of global illumination approaches exist, which mostly share the same restriction: the real scene is approximated by a static model, which was built in advance and thus has to remain static. In our paper, we propose an image-space global illumination approach, based on reflective shadow maps, combined with the use of an RGB-D camera, to simulate first bounce diffuse indirect illumination without any pre-computations. Our approach supports indirect illumination in both directions (real to virtual and vice versa) and runs in real-time. Furthermore, it does not require advanced shader properties, since we developed an implementation making efficient usage of the Z-Buffer algorithm for calculating indirect illumination.