Implementing The Phong Reflection Model With OpenGL

Northfield Mount Hermon School
Sep 7, 2025

Lorcan Purcell

This project implements the Phong reflection model in OpenGL to simulate realistic lighting on 3D objects. Ambient, diffuse, and specular components were programmed in GLSL shaders and combined to produce dynamic lighting effects on a moving light source and a rotating cube. The project demonstrates how mathematical concepts such as vector normalization, dot products, and reflection vectors translate into real-time graphics rendering, highlighting both the challenges and educational value of low-level graphics programming