Firefly: Virtual Illumination Drones for Interactive Visualization

Light specification in three dimensional scenes is a complex problem and several approaches have been presented that aim to automate this process. However, there are many scenarios where a static light setup is insufficient, as the scene content and camera position may change. Simultaneous manual control over the camera and light position imposes a high cognitive load on the user. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel approach for automatic scene illumination with Fireflies. Fireflies are intelligent virtual light drones that illuminate the scene by traveling on a closed path. The Firefly path automatically adapts to changes in the scene based on an outcome-oriented energy function. To achieve interactive performance, we employ a parallel rendering pipeline for the light path evaluations. We provide a catalog of energy functions for various application scenarios and discuss the applicability of our method on several examples.