Dynamic Visual Effects for Virtual Environments

Abstract

We introduce a high level interface capable of instantly adding and manipulating a multitude of visual effects for any object or area in VE scenes. This enables a controlling person or an automated system to react to the in scene situation and the user’s actions by dynamically changing the scene’s appearance. Such a high-level scene and effect access is also a powerful tool for story telling engines and scene authors to support the intended plot or impact. To achieve this smoothly and effectively, our interface allows fading of effects to generate soft effect transitions and grouped effects for controlling complex effect combinations in a simple way. We also describe our fully functional implementation and the changes necessary to realize our concept in a scene graph based VR-system. We further introduce a simple script interface to add new effects to the available effect pool. We present, but are not limited to, three visual effect types: shader effects, post-processing effects, and OpenGl based effects. Our implementation supports multi-pipe displays, multi-pass rendering, and an arbitrarily deep per-object post-processing effect graph.