, an up-and-coming field of mathematics, has
found its way into video games thanks to Geomerics
, a British startup.
Although the company has yet to release details of their products, they've recently published some information on
technology advances made possible by geometric algebra which help add further realism into gaming.
Currently, lighting in games is a toss-up between three elements: in real life, light often changes position (e.g. as
the sun moves across the sky); objects cast shadows, which are often quite subtle; and depending on your viewpoint, you
can sometimes see light sources reflected in other objects. The usual method is to pre-calculate the shadows in a scene
and paint them on the ground, but this means the light source must stay fixed. Thanks to next-gen computing power, spherical harmonic
lighting can be used to generate soft,
lifelike shadows from moving light sources, but without any of the shiny surface effects that complete the picture and
Geomerics' development, using geometric algebra and wavelet technologies, allows all three
elements to be computed in realtime: moving light sources, soft shadows and glossy surfaces. Hopefully this means that
next-gen graphics can get even better.