How can I make someone feel as though they are holding a genuine opal?
Well, the obvious answer is to buy a synthetic opal. You can find one cheaply on Etsy, and because it is a physical object, it already has the weight, surface, and play of color that a render has to reconstruct. That would be the sensible thing to do.
So how did I end up doing this digitally? I became curious about a different question: could I recreate the impression of opal with the tools I had and already knew? In another set of conditions, those tools might have been a canvas, a brush, and a good collection of pigments. Mine happen to be screens, cameras, computers, and now AI.
However, the creative impulse and the approach are very close to painting. You study an object until you begin to understand what creates the impression of it, then you try to convey that impression within the limits of your medium. The result is an image, ultimately a pattern of light on the retina, but the process also teaches you how to observe, use your tools more skillfully (including your own mind), and work through their constraints. That is where fulfillment and self-mastery come from.
Now, I ended up rendering an opal on augmented reality glasses, as they were the medium I was exploring at the time. The project also gave me a reason to develop tools and techniques that might eventually inspire or help someone else.
In a separate article, I went deep into how I rendered the opal’s view-dependent appearance. The method runs fine on laptops and might work on XR headsets, though I still need to try it on my Quest 3. As of July 2026, however, it was still too computationally demanding to run in real time on current-generation AR glasses.
So I needed a workaround: a proxy. In computer graphics, a proxy is a lightweight representation used in place of a more expensive asset or process. Here, it replaces live optical simulation with a set of pre-rendered views selected according to the viewer’s position.
Made with care, by Armand