Readings: ray tracing

For next Tuesday, we'll be reading and discussing the classic Whitted ray tracing paper, as well as an early paper on using GPU cards to do ray tracing:

• Turner Whitted. 1980. An improved illumination model for shaded display. Commun. ACM 23, 6, 343-349. See also the ray tracing Wikipedia page, which mentions the recent effort at Intel to do ray tracing in real time. Particularly interesting there is the list of benefits of ray tracing for games, and the video of the results. Presented by Kha.
• Timothy J. Purcell, Ian Buck, William R. Mark, and Pat Hanrahan. 2002. Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware. ACM Trans. Graph. 21, 3, 703-712. Stanford's project site includes slides for the matching talk. Presented by Nick.