Expressive lighting for interactive entertainment

Abstract

Lighting design is an essential element of visual storytelling. In cinematic theory, lighting design plays an important role in illumination, directing viewer's gaze to important locations, and portraying visual tension. However, lighting design is a complex process, and is especially problematic for interactive entertainment systems, since important design parameters such as spatial configuration, dramatic focus, and dramatic intensity, cannot be determined in advance. Indeed, they often change dramatically during interaction. Additionally, manually adjusting colors, positions, and angles of each light in a scene is a time consuming and tedious process. In this paper, we describe a system developed based on cinematic and theatrical lighting design theory to automatically adjust positions, colors, and angles of each light in real-time to accommodate the continually evolving dramatic situation, while maintaining the desired style, and ensuring visual continuity.