Abstract: We present a novel real-time technique for computing inter-object ambient occlusion. For each occluding object, we precompute a field in the surrounding space that encodes an approximation of the occlusion caused by the object. This volumetric information is then used at run-time in a fragment program for quickly determining the shadow cast on the receiving objects. According to our results, both the computational and storage requirements are low enough for the technique to be directly applicable to computer games running on the current graphics hardware.