Eye-Dome Lighting

Eye-Dome Lighting (EDL) is a specialized GPU-based shading technique used by the Foresight Development Kit to improve depth perception when visualizing dense datasets, such as point clouds or unlit meshes.

Enhancing Depth and Form

In complex 3D scenes, especially those without traditional lighting or consistent surface normals, it can be difficult for the human eye to distinguish between overlapping objects or to perceive the true shape of a surface. Point clouds, in particular, often appear as “flat” clouds of color.

EDL solves this by calculating silhouette outlines and depth discontinuities in real-time on the GPU. By darkening edges and areas of high depth change, it creates a subtle but powerful visual effect that makes the structure of the data immediately apparent.

Key Advantages

• Improved Interpretation: Makes it easier to identify features, boundaries, and spatial relationships in dense datasets.
• Unlit Data Support: Provides depth cues even for data that lacks lighting information or surface normals.
• Real-Time Performance: Implemented as an efficient post-processing effect, ensuring it has minimal impact on the overall frame rate.
• Adjustable Strength: Developers and users can tune the strength of the EDL effect to suit the specific characteristics of their data.

Use in the SDK

The EDL effect is primarily used with the Volumesight engine to enhance point cloud visualization. It is applied to the 3D viewport and can be adjusted as needed.