Channels ▼   Reinventing Ray Tracing  Joining us today is James
McCombe, the technical visionary behind Caustic Graphics and one
of the company's three founders. Most recently James was the
chief architect of Apple's next-generation embedded
rasterization algorithms, the basis of the rendering and
compositing technology used in the iPhone and iPod. He was also
a lead architect for Apple's OpenGL graphics system, and worked
with the OpenGL standards committee to create early
specifications for programmable shading languages.  Dr. Dobb's:
James, what is ray tracing and why is it important?  JM: Ray
tracing is a method of using "virtual light rays" to determine
visibility between two points in a geometric scene. This allows
for the modeling of physically accurate lighting phenomena such
as reflection, refraction, soft shadowing, and global
illumination, just to name a few.  The simplest example involves
starting with a pixel on the display. We trace a ray outward
until we encounter the first object in the scene