Walking into ancient paintings with virtual candles

Taking a famous Chinese painting for a case study, the paper presents a virtual exhibition platform. Through the platform, users can walk into the scenes in the painting with virtual candles in hands, know the scenes which are endowed vitality by attaching actor performances, and see every detail of the artwork. The scenes change their light, shades and shadows in real time by the candles, just as real scenes. For real-time candle-moving and light-changing interaction, in implementation, we render the light effects at densely sampled user positions offline, and extract the light, shades and shadows as masks; during online processing, the system merges the artwork with masks chosen by the positions of candles. The system, novel in both design and techniques, has been partially used in the Palace Museum (Beijing).