What differentiates a good video game from a mouth-dropping photorealistic virtual adventure? That's right, the lighting. In 2001, ambient occlusion was used in the movie Pearl Harbor and marked a turning point in video and game development. Technically speaking, ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique that calculates how bright certain parts of a screen should be in relation to other objects of a scene. Ambient occlusion defines areas that are fully exposed to the light source, for example, a character's face, and darkens other parts, such as creases of clothes, imitating the natural illumination.^[1]