This collection of papers was conceived during our research on radiosity, in particular for Virtual Reality applications. The first paper on radiosity appeared fourteen years ago [Goral84]. Since then, research into radiosity has become very popular in the computer graphics field. To date, there are few good books which cover the subject of radiosity [Cohen93, Ashdown94, Sillion94]. However, many times in the books, the details of specific technique can only be found in the original papers, as such, during the course of our research, we often had to seek reprints directly from the authors of those papers. We were kindly received by those authors who have provided us either with the original scripts or with electronic postscripts. A source book containing a selection from the more outstanding material seems appropriate to supplement the texts; hence this book.

We believe that this collection would benefit radiosity researchers as well as final year graduate or postgraduate students doing a course involving radiosity as either part of a module or as a complete module itself.

During our research, we classified the radiosity papers and publications into four main categories; (1) Radiosity and related works, (2) software acceleration techniques, (3) hardware acceleration techniques and (4) radiosity for VR applications. In this book, in addition to the four categories, we have included another category - Suggestive techniques in radiosity for VR applications. Papers in the latter category are techniques that have not yet been applied to radiosity but were suggested to be suitable for doing so, in my M.Sc. thesis [Yeap97].

The criteria for including a paper in this anthology were determined by considering the perspective and insight it would afford potential readers interested in radiosity and radiosity for VR applications.

It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge and thank all those people who have kindly given to me of their time, energy and support. This book is the brainchild of my thesis supervisor - Prof. Graham Birtwistle, who has shared with me many of his experiences for doing a good thesis. I would also like to thank the authors for the various papers in this book and for sharing their ideas on radiosity. I am equally grateful to Dr. Ken Brodlie and Dr. Terence Fernando for introducing me to the theoretical world of Scientific Visualisation and Advanced Computer Graphics (CG), without which I would be still stuck in the hacking world of CG! Finally, I am also thankful to Dennis Bell for proof-reading all my manuscripts.

To those who are in the progress of doing research in radiosity, I extend my hope that you will find the process rewarding and exciting. All radiosity materials, including my thesis, links to on-line radiosity papers and publications and many more can be found online [Yeap97b, Yeap97c].

Tralvex S. L. Yeap
University of Leeds, UK

References

[Ashdown93] Ashdown I. (1994). Radiosity: A Programmer’s Perspective. Wiley, Canada.

[Cohen93] Cohen M. and Wallace J. (1993). Radiosity and Realistic Image Synthesis. Academic Press. San Diego, California.

[Goral84] Goral C. M., Torrance K.E., Greenberg D. P. and B. Battaile (1984). "Modelling the Interaction of Light between Diffuse Surfaces", Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’84 Proceedings) 18(3):213-222.

[Sillion94] Sillion, F. and Puech, C. (1994). Radiosity and Global illumination. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA.

[Yeap97a] Yeap, T. (1997). Radiosity for Virtual Reality Systems. M.Sc. Thesis. School of Computer Studies. University of Leeds. Leeds, United Kingdom.

[Yeap97b] Yeap T., Henderson S., Brodlie K. (1997). Computer Graphics at University of Leeds. United Kingdom. <http://dream.leeds.ac.uk/cuddles/>

[Yeap97c] Yeap, T. (1997). T-Rex Footprints. Singapore. <http://www.singnet.com.sg/~tyeap>