One of the perennial goals of Computer Graphics is creating high quality images which are indistinguishable from photographs: a goal referred to as photorealism. Another important goal is interactivity for visualization, simulation, gaming and other real-time applications. These two goals have historically been at odds with each other.
In this course, we will review the history and some of the recent ideas that seek to bridge the gap between realism and interactivity. We will focus on the use of complex lighting and shading within limited computation time. Specifically, topics will cover programmable shaders, real-time shadows, interactive global illumination, image-based rendering, precomputed rendering, adaptive sampling and reconstruction, and real-time ray tracing.