“Reflection Morphing” by Martin and Popescu

Most scenes of interest to computer graphics applications contain reflective surfaces. Rendering such surfaces accurately and effectively is challenging. Most interactive graphics applications render reflections using environment mapping. Environment mapping approximates reflections drastically. In some situations, a reflected point is drawn hundreds of pixels away from its correct location. Environment mapping does not provide motion parallax, in other words, distant and near reflected objects do not move with respect to each other as the desired view translates. Accurate reflections can be obtained by ray tracing but that comes at the price of sacrificing interactivity.