Ray traced virtual reality

Abstract

One of the goals of Virtual Reality (VR) has always been the pursuit of more realistic display of virtual worlds. Many algorithms have been developed to add effects to rasterization-based rendering systems, but for many effects ray tracing is still the only method that can accurately simulate them. Algorithmic advances and the power of computer systems in recent years has made ray tracing a feasible alternative to rasterization. This work describes the integration of the real-time ray tracing system Manta into the VR framework system VR Juggler. The results show that it is possible to create ray traced Virtual Environments (VE) running at interactive rates with latencies around 100 msec. This is made possible by using compute clusters, parallelization, high-speed image compression and dynamic scaling of image quality to the desired update rates. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.