RealTime Raytracing from Intel

A new video from Intel is online at YouTube, where Intel Research Scientist Daniel Pohl shows an update on their “Realtime Ray Tracing” project.

With the power of upcoming many-core architectures Intel is developing, real-time ray tracing (using the physics of light to realistically render an interactive 3D scene) comes closer and closer to the desktop. At Research@Intel Day 2009, Intel researchers showcased the latest innovations from our Real-time Ray Tracing project, including more realistic 3D water and the ability to render more than 500 animated characters at once, and showed a version rendering multiple camera views on a stereoscopic display, in which viewers can see the 3D depth of the scene without the need for special glasses. See video from Research@Intel Day 2009 for more info.

Now, the video is pretty neat.  The 8-layer stereoscopic display alone is pretty impressive.  But I fail to see what, if anything, in this demonstration is Ray-Tracing.  The water looks like classic tesselated surfaces, and so does the environment.  Maybe someone in the PR group got confused and used the wrong buzzword?  Or maybe it’s just a bad demonstration of the technology.  See the video after the break, and tell us what you think.

via Intel Press Room

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .