Raytracing Renaissance: An elegant framework for modeling light at Multiple Scales

Abstract

Ray tracing remains of interest to Computer Graphics community with its elegant framing of how light interacts with objects, being able to easily support multiple light sources, and simple framework of merging synthetic and real cameras. Recent trends to provide implementations at the chip-level means raytracing’s constant quest of realism would propel its usage in real-time applications. AR/VR, Animations, 3DGames Industry, 3D-large scale simulations, and future social computing platforms are just a few examples of possible major impact. Raytracing is also appealing to HCI community because raytracing extends well along the 3D-space and time, seamlessly blending both synthetic and real cameras at multiple scales to support storytelling. This presentation will include a few milestones from my work such as the Slicing Extent technique and Directed Safe Zones. Our recent applications of applying machine learning techniques creating novel synthetic views, which could also provide a future doorway to handle dynamic scenes with more compute power as needed, will also be presented. It is once again renaissance for ray tracing which for last 50+ years has remained the most elegant technique for modeling light phenomena in virtual worlds at whatever scale compute power could support.