Web-based light simulation and interactive configuration for lighting systems

Abstract

The current generation of lighting systems produced by lighting manufacturers can be highly configurable. Consequently, it is challenging for manufacturers to showcase the potential of configurations and the impact of light on specific environments. This issue is further compounded by the increasing prevalence of online shopping in the lamp industry, which has historically been a relatively slow-moving sector. This paper presents an interactive, web-based configurator for complex lighting systems featuring real-time light simulation running on the client. Our work addresses the aforementioned issues directly by facilitating fast, physically accurate path tracing for interactive exploration and a novel and intuitive user interface for lamp system configurations. Consequently, our approach is highly performant due to analytical calculations for measured, physical lamp data stored in texture space for rendering and exploring static light configurations. Thus, our system can be executed on low-specification hardware and mobile devices while maintaining interactivity.