Remote and scalable interactive high-fidelity graphics using asynchronous computation

Abstract

Current computing devices span a large and varied range of computational power. Interactive high-fidelity graphics is still unachievable on many of the devices widely available to the public, such as desktops and laptops without high-end dedicated graphics cards, tablets and mobile phones. In this paper we present a scalable solution for interactive high-fidelity graphics with global illumination in the cloud. Specifically, we introduce a novel method for the asynchronous remote computation of indirect lighting that is both scalable and efficient. A lightweight client implementation merges the remotely computed indirect contribution with locally computed direct lighting for a full global illumination solution. The approach proposed in this paper applies instant radiosity methods to a precomputed point cloud representation of the scene; an equivalent structure on the client side is updated on demand, and used to reconstruct the indirect contribution. This method can be deployed on platforms of varying computational power, from tablets to high-end desktops and video game consoles. Furthermore, the same dynamic GI solution computed on the cloud can be used concurrently with multiple clients sharing a virtual environment with minimal overheads.