Interactive Volume Rendering Aurora on the GPU

• Main Authors: Orion Sky, Lawlor Jon Genetti
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Volume rendering; aurora borealis; atmo- spheric; ren
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.689.6314

We present a combination of techniques to render the aurora borealis in real time on a modern graphics pro-cessing unit (GPU). Unlike the general 3D volume ren-dering problem, an auroral display is emissive and can be factored into a height-dependent energy deposition function, and a 2D electron flux map. We also present a GPU-friendly atmosphere model, which includes an integrable analytic approximation of the atmosphere’s density along a ray. Together, these techniques enable a modern consumer graphics card to realistically render the aurora at 20–80fps, from any point of view either inside or outside the atmosphere.