Geomerics - Advancing Technology Through Innovation

Geomerics co-founder and COO Dr Chris Doran today outlined some of the content of his forthcoming talk at the Science Museum where he will exclusively debut a short animation demonstrating the ground-breaking technology.

Geomerics has developed revolutionary software that makes real-time radiosity possible for the first time in the history videogames. The software creates dynamic, realistic lighting effects making games look increasingly life-like.

Dr Chris Doran commented, "I'll be unveiling a glimpse of what our technology is capable of - lighting is the next challenge for videogames with real-time radiosity in particular seen as the Holy Grail of game programming. In fact, there are those who say this is still not possible, even on the new generation of consoles, but I'm here to prove that it is."

Radiosity, fully modeling the subtle effects arising from the inter-reflections of light between surfaces, dominates many real-world situations. Shadows in exterior scenes are filled in by light reflecting from bright areas, and the 'mood' of a room is heavily influenced by the colours of the walls, a red wall makes the room feel warm and welcoming, a blue wall makes it feel cold and menacing. Current state-of-the-art lighting technology used in games involves either pre-computing the entire global illumination off-line or assuming there are no inter-reflections and computing only the direct effects of lights on what they are illuminating. But pre-computed lighting results in lighting environments that cannot be altered, and only accounting for direct illumination results in the type of 'flat' unrealistic scenes that are commonplace in games. If a torch is shone on a wall in a game only the wall is lit whereas in reality the reflected light from this wall will reveal much more of the environment.

Radiosity lighting is one of a host of challenges facing the next generation of games developers, and in his science museum talk Dr. Doran will discuss these problems and how close we are to solving them.

Download the full talk here.

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