Intel announced their research on Light Field Mapping in August 2001. Intel now released an open source software package with which the company hopes to provide an advancement in the development of 3D graphics. Read more... Intel's free Open Source Light Field Mapping Toolkit aims to model the reflection properties of light on objects, for instance if light is reflected from a metal statue: The toolkit contains software to render 3D objects off of digital photographs and code to playback the LFM objects. Developers are said to be able to freely use and modify the code. Intel describes LFM like this: This method approximates the radiance data by partitioning it over elementary surface primitives and decomposing each part into a small set of lower-dimensional discrete functions. The resulting light field represenation is compact and can be directly used for hardware-accelerated rendering that accurately conveys the physical realism of the original data at interactive frame rates on a personal computer. According to Intel they are cooperating with first tier 3D chip manufacturers to achieve full compatibility with current hardware. LFM is said to work on a hardware accelerated level with available boards. Responsible for LFM development is a russian research team in the Intel Russia Research Center located in Nihzniy Novgorod which was built in 2001 and currently employs 30 IT specialists. The open source project website on LFM is located here.
Related link: Intel LFM page | Presetation videos available