AN EMPHASIZED HIGHLIGHT MODEL OF METALLIC OBJECT ON CAVE SYSTEM IN CONSIDERATION OF CONTRAST AND PARALLAX

Accurate rendering of a virtual scene in real time has been one of important issues for virtual reality (VR) technology. Specular reflection of light has been studied a long time, which is always seen on a metallic object and causes occasionally very strong brightness (highlight). Due to restriction of number of gradation of brightness (usually 256), maximum brightness and contrast ratio, the highlight is relatively weakly represented by displays and projectors. In addition, specular reflection will be take influence of binocular parallax and motion parallax, because it is light to reflect in a specific course. Therefore in this paper, an emphasized highlight model of a metallic object on the CAVE system is proposed. Decreasing brightness slightly on neighbor area of highlighted area, the proposed method increases contrast ratio between the highlighted area and neighbor area. Furthermore, using features of CAVE, the proposed method also represents glance (blink). When a metallic object moves, the method alternatively represents images with highlight and without highlight for both eyes. Since the difference of images for both eyes influences binocular parallax and motion parallax, a userfeels glance more realistically.