Visual Simulation of Heat Shimmering and Mirage
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Ye Zhao Yiping Han Zhe Fan Feng Qiu Yuchuan Kuo Arie Kaufman Klaus Mueller |
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Center for Visual Computing, Department of Computer Science Stony Brook University |
Abstract:
We provide a physically-based framework for simulating the natural phenomena related to the heat interaction of objects and the surrounding air. We introduce a heat transfer model between the heat source objects and the ambient flow environment, which includes conduction, convection and radiation. The heat distribution of the objects is represented by a novel temperature texture. We simulate the thermal flow dynamics that models the air flow interacting with the heat by a hybrid thermal lattice Boltzmann model (HTLBM). The computational approach couples a multiple-relaxation-time LBM (MRTLBM) with a finite difference discretization of a standard diffusion-advection equation for temperature. In heat shimmering and mirage, the changes in the index of refraction are attributed to temperature variation. A nonlinear ray tracing method is used for rendering the visual results. Interactive performance is achieved by accelerating the computation of both the MRTLBM and the heat transfer, as well as the rendering on contemporary graphics hardware (GPU).
Heat
Shimmering Images and Movies:
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White paint (Video)
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Asphalt (Video) |
Copper (Video) |
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A sun-heated surface composed of
different materials, resulting in different shimmering effects on a stone wall
in the background |
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Original scene |
Zoom-in original scene |
Heat shimmering |
Zoom-in heat shimmering |
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Desert Shimmering (Video) |
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Original scene |
Heat shimmering starts |
Heat shimmering rises |
Zoom-in view |
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Shimmering from a truck hood due
to the engine heat (Video) |
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Original scene |
Heat shimmering starts |
Heat shimmering rises |
Wind blowing from right |
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Shimmering from a hot
bagel (Video) |
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Mirage
Images and Movies:
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Real mirage photo |
Original scene |
Mirage generated by our simulation |
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Original desert |
A phantom body of water appears |
Water area becomes larger |
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Mirage in a desert (Video) |
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Hardware acceleration of both simulation and rendering on single
GPU: Real-time video capture (23.2M)
The movies are compressed by DivX, Free DivX decoder can
be downloaded at www.divx.com
Go back to Ye Zhao's research work
Last updated on 09/30/2005