Interactive rendering systems provide a powerful way to convey information, especially for complex environments. Until recently the only interactive rendering algorithms were hardware-accelerated polygonal renderers. This approach has limitations due to both the algorithms used and the tight coupling to the hardware. Software-only implementations are more easily modified and extended which enables experimentation with various rendering and interaction options.
This project, done in collaboration with the sci group, explores of an interactive ray tracing system designed for current multiprocessor machines. Our prototype system is surprisingly interactive as can be seen in this mpeg animation (38Mb). Although the system takes careful advantage of system resources, it is essentially a brute force implementation. We intentionally take the simple path wherever feasible at each step believing that neither limiting assumptions nor complex algorithms are needed for performance.
The ray tracing system is interactive in part because it runs on a high-end machine (SGI Origin 2000) with fast frame buffer, CPU set, and interconnect. The key advantages of ray tracing are:
The first item allows our implementation to be interactive, the second allows this interactivity to extend to relatively large (e.g. gigabyte) scenes, and the third allows the familiar ray traced look with shadows and specular reflection.
The major areas we are looking at now are:
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