Perceptions of Hybrid Lighting for Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) applications are computationally demanding due to high frame rate requirements, which precludes large numbers of realtime lights from being used. In this paper, we explore a hybrid lighting approach that combines the benefits of realtime and baked lights based on the importance of each source. First, we demonstrate that the hybrid approach affords better frames per second than realtime and mixed lighting. We then present the results of an online paired-comparison study, in which participants (n = 60) compared videos of the four lighting conditions (baked, mixed, realtime, and hybrid) in terms of preference. Our results indicate that the hybrid lighting approach is better than realtime lighting in terms of graphical performance and also yields better perceptions of quality for scenes with a small to moderately large number of lights.