Phong

Phong is a Vietnamese given name and surname. In Vietnamese naming conventions, Phong can appear both as a family name and as a given name. The spelling Phong is common in Vietnam and among Vietnamese speakers living abroad, and it appears in a variety of contexts, from personal names to places or terms borrowed into other languages.

In computer graphics, Phong shading, or the Phong reflection model, is a local illumination model used to simulate how light interacts with surfaces. It separates lighting into ambient, diffuse, and specular components. The diffuse term models matte reflection, while the specular term models shiny highlights, with a shininess exponent controlling the size and sharpness of the highlights. The model allows for smooth shading across polygonal surfaces by computing lighting at each point on a surface. It has been widely implemented in real-time rendering and offline rendering, and it is commonly taught as a foundational shading technique. The Phong model is often discussed alongside other shading approaches such as Gouraud shading and the Blinn-Phong variant, which modify the calculation of the specular term.

The Phong reflection model was developed by Bui Tuong Phong, a Vietnamese American computer scientist, in the 1970s. The term Phong in this context has become a standard reference in computer graphics literature and education, signifying a key approach to modeling surface illumination in 3D rendering.