LightPack: Light Field Software - Source Code

LightPack is a portable software library for image-based authoring and rendering. It is based on the idea of representing an environment (or object) as a flow of light in free space. (see Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan, Light Field Rendering, Proc. SIGGRAPH '96.)

The software release will contain the full source code for the lifview and lifauth programs, as well as the accompanying light field library. We are currently preparing the code for distribution, and are planning a major source release soon.

Table of Contents

LightPack Overview

LightPack is a software library for viewing and generating light fields. The library has the following features: The library is intended for use in C or C++ programs but may be useful with other programming languages.

The library does not use any specialized hardware and is therefore portable to most platforms, yet it achieves fairly fast rendering times. On an SGI Indy workstation, a 256x256 window can be rendered about 5 times a second.

The actual files for lifview and lifauth are fairly short. Most of the work is done through calls to the light field library functions. The library functions are implemented in a data flow architecture, so that large datasets can be handled on systems with less RAM.

LightPack Software Distribution

The first release of LightPack will be version 1.0alpha1, which will be an alpha release. This version is written in a dataflow format, so that large lightfields can be created and compressed on systems with limited memory resources. There will be library functions for reading, writing, authoring, compressing, filtering, and drawing light fields.

Distribution notice

Copyright © 1996 The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Except for commercial resale, lease, license or other commercial transactions, permission is hereby given to use, copy, and/or modify this software, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies of this software. No part of this software or any derivatives thereof may be used in the production of computer models for resale or for use in a commercial product.

This software is provided "as is" and without warranty of any kind, express, implied or otherwise, including without limitation, any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

If you have any questions, problems, concerns, or suggestions about the lightpack software, send mail to:
lightpack@graphics.stanford.edu

If you would like to receive announcements about future releases, send mail to:

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subscribe lightpack-announce
Last update: 6 August 1996
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