Interactive Relighting Tools for Virtual Avatars, Digital Doubles, and Telepresence

• Fajar Pratama

  Garuda Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Jalan Malioboro 78, Yogyakarta 55212, Indonesia

  Author

• Ayu Rahmani

  Citra Nusantara University, Faculty of Computing and Digital Media, Jalan Asia Afrika 59, Bandung 40111, Indonesia

  Author

Virtual avatars, digital doubles, and telepresence systems increasingly mediate professional collaboration, social interaction, and entertainment, yet the visual plausibility of these digital humans remains strongly constrained by lighting. Illumination modulates appearance, reveals or suppresses geometric detail, conveys mood, and communicates subtle social cues. Traditional offline rendering pipelines can synthesize photorealistic relighting of captured or modeled humans, but they are not suitable for interactive scenarios where lighting must respond to user input, dynamic environments, or real-time communication. This paper examines interactive relighting tools for controllable virtual identities, with a focus on their application to real-time avatars, high-fidelity digital doubles, and telepresence experiences. The discussion spans physical and mathematical models of light transport, data-driven relighting with neural representations, system-level design of low-latency pipelines, and perceptual aspects of lighting control interfaces. A unified perspective is developed in which avatar appearance is expressed as a low-dimensional, controllable mapping from scene illumination and viewing configuration to rendered imagery, and in which interaction is understood as exploration of this appearance manifold under tight computational constraints. The paper analyzes trade-offs between physical accuracy, temporal stability, and latency, and it considers the role of capture, learning, and prior knowledge in building robust relighting models. Special attention is given to the design of user-facing tools that support intuitive yet precise lighting control for communication, performance, and content creation. The paper concludes with open challenges related to generalization, cross-device consistency, and the integration of relighting with broader telepresence and mixed reality ecosystems.

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