Real-Time 3D Simulation of Heat-Induced Air Turbulence

2026-03-02

AI Summary

Existing real-time methods for simulating heat-induced air turbulence predominantly rely on single-view 2D screen-space warping, which struggles to achieve multi-view consistency and depth-aware physical realism. This work proposes the first real-time, fully 3D Lagrangian framework that leverages a temperature-advection-driven compressible SPH simulation to model thermal buoyancy and turbulence, thereby constructing a continuous refractive index field. Rendering is performed via curvature-aware ray tracing with spatially adaptive step sizes. The method achieves, for the first time, multi-view-consistent and physically plausible real-time 3D simulation of thermal turbulence, preserving high-frequency distortion details while maintaining computational efficiency and numerical stability. A prototype implementation runs at 40 FPS, significantly outperforming existing image-based approaches.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web crawling and indexing
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

Heat-induced air turbulence produces complex, depth-dependent image distortions that are challenging to reproduce interactively because thermally driven flow must be coupled with refractive light transport. Existing real-time methods often rely on single-view 2D screen-space warps that break multi-view coherence and do not model a 3D refractive volume. We present a real-time, fully 3D Lagrangian framework that models the full pipeline from thermal transport to density variation to optical refraction. Our system augments compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) with temperature transport, buoyancy, and pressure-driven motion to capture rising plumes and turbulent mixing. We render the resulting continuous refractive-index field via curved ray tracing to model light bending in 3D. To reconcile physical fidelity with interactive performance, we introduce spatially adaptive step-size integration for curved-ray tracing, refining steps near strong refractive-index gradients while relaxing them in smooth regions to preserve temporal stability and high-frequency distortion detail without uniform oversampling. The system runs at interactive rates (about 40 fps in our prototype) and matches depth-dependent, multi-view-consistent distortions observed in real video captures more closely than image-based baselines.

Problem

• heat-induced air turbulence
• real-time 3D simulation
• refractive light transport
• multi-view coherence
• depth-dependent distortion

Innovation

• real-time 3D simulation
• heat-induced turbulence
• refractive rendering
• adaptive ray tracing
• Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics