Specular reflection is the mirror-like bouncing of light off a smooth surface in a single dominant direction, governed by the angle of incidence. It produces highlights that move as the viewer or light source moves. Polished metal, glass, water, and glossy paint all exhibit strong specular reflection.
When light hits a smooth surface, it reflects at an angle equal to its angle of arrival, measured from the surface normal. This concentrates the reflected light into a narrow direction and creates a bright highlight. Because that highlight depends on the relative positions of the light, the surface, and the viewer, it moves across the surface as any of them move.
The smoother the surface, the tighter and sharper the highlight. Rougher surfaces spread the reflection into a softer glossy sheen. Specular reflection is one half of most physically based material models, paired with a diffuse component, and it is described formally by a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF).
Specular highlights are view-dependent, and view-dependence is exactly what trips up 3D reconstruction and rendering. A highlight is not a fixed point on the object. It is a moving reflection of the light source, and reconstruction methods that match features across photographs can mistake it for real geometry, placing points off the surface.
Dubar et al. (IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, 2026) show that even modern Gaussian splatting, augmented with spherical harmonics to encode view-dependent color, cannot fully reproduce strong specular and reflective effects. Since specular materials such as screens, packaging, automotive paint, and jewelry are common in retail and advertising, this is a practical limit on what looks convincing in 3D.
Specular and other view-dependent effects are properties of the source asset and the representation used to capture it, not of the delivery layer. Miris conditions an asset once upstream and streams it adaptively, so as capture and representation methods improve at handling specular materials, those gains reach viewers through the same pipeline. Miris does not render specular highlights itself or improve their accuracy. It delivers whatever the asset encodes. The representation is the asset owner's choice. Miris owns the method of delivery.
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