Explore the luminous rings formed when sunlight is backscattered by a field of
near-uniform cloud droplets.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
A rainbow's smaller cousin
A glory forms around the antisolar point when tiny, similarly-sized water droplets
send light almost directly back toward the observer. Each wavelength returns at a
slightly different angle, producing nested spectral rings.
This browser study is based on my dissertation research
on real-time, GPU-accelerated spectral rendering of atmospheric glories. Motivated by
my own real-world experience of skydiving through glories, my goal was
to achieve sufficient fidelity and rendering speed to support a virtual-reality
simulation of that activity.
No AI is used to render the glories. Generative AI assisted in creating this web version
from the original desktop application, which used OpenGL compute shaders.
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