Refraction is the bending of light as it passes from one transparent medium into another, such as from air into glass or water. The amount of bending depends on each material's index of refraction. Refraction is why a straw looks broken in a glass of water.
Light travels at different speeds in different transparent materials. When a ray crosses the boundary between two media, such as air and glass, the change in speed bends its path. The degree of bending is set by each material's index of refraction and is described by Snell's law.
Refraction is why lenses focus light, why water distorts the objects behind it, and why a cut gemstone splits light into color. For 3D systems, refraction means the color seen through a transparent object is not the object's own surface color but a bent view of whatever lies behind it.
Transparent and refractive objects are among the hardest things to reconstruct and render. What a camera records through glass is a distorted image of the surrounding scene, and that image shifts with viewpoint. Reconstruction methods interpret these shifting views as conflicting geometry.
Dubar et al. (IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, 2026) show that Gaussian splatting projects refracted detail to incorrect locations, leaving the interior of a glass object effectively empty in the recovered geometry, even when the method starts from ground-truth data. Glassware, bottles, eyewear, and packaging are common commercial subjects, which makes refraction a recurring obstacle for photoreal 3D.
Refraction is a property of the asset and the method used to capture it. Miris is representation-agnostic delivery infrastructure: it conditions an asset once upstream and streams it adaptively to any device, regardless of how the asset handles transparent materials. Miris does not resolve refraction or improve how a transparent object is rendered. As research produces representations better suited to refractive content, Miris delivers them through the same pipeline without changing how content is streamed or embedded. You own the asset. Miris owns the method of delivery.
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