Baking Light: Global Illumination in VR Environments as architectural design tool

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As proven in the past, immersive Virtual Environments can be helpful in the process of architectural design (Achten et al. 1999). But still years later, these systems are not common in the architectural design process, neither in architectural education nor in professional work. The reasons might be the high price of e.g. CAVEs, the lack of intuitive navigation and design tools in those environments, the absence of useful and easy to handle design workflows, and the quality constraints of real-time display of 3D models. A great potential for VR in the architectural workflow is the review of design decisions: Display quality, comfortable navigation and realistic illumination are crucial ingredients here. Light is one of the principal elements in architectural design, so design reviews must enable the architect to judge the quality of his design in this respect. Realistic light simulations, e.g. via radiosity algorithms, are no longer the domain of high-end graphic workstations. Today's off-the-shelf hardware and 3D-software provide the architect with high-quality tools to simulate physically correct light distributions. But the quality and impression of light is hard to judge from looking at still renderings. In collaboration with the Institute of Computer Graphics at our university we have established a series of regular design reviews in their immersive virtual environment. This paper describes the workflow that has emerged from this collaboration, the tools that were developed and used, and our practical experiences with global-light-simulations. We share results which we think are helpful to others, and we highlight areas where further research is necessary.