The physics of cloaking

In this seminar, Dr. Greg Gbur presents the current state of research on cloaking devices, the differences between science fiction and what seem to actually be possible, and different applications beyond invisibility, like protection from thermal radiation or earthquakes.

More schlieren photography

I previously mentioned a video showing how schlieren photography could be used to film the propagation of sound.

This video by the Harvard Natural Science Lecture Demonstrations, presents different experiments with schlieren photography. The complete description of the setup used, as well as the explanation of the effect, is also available on the associated web page.

A GLSL version of smallpt

smallpt is a bare minimum path tracer written under 100 lines of C++, featuring diffuse, and specular reflection, and refraction. Using the detailed explanation slides by David Cline, I experimented porting it to GLSL on Shadertoy.

This proved to be an interesting experiment that brought a few lessons.

You can see the shader and tweak it here. By default it uses 6 samples per pixel, and 3 bounces, which allows it to run smoothly on average hardware. I found 40 samples per pixel and 5 bounces to give nice results while maintaining interactive framerate.

Path tracing, 40 samples per pixel, 5 bounces

Path tracing, 40 samples per pixel, 5 bounces

Update: since GLSL Sandbox has a feature, reading from the previous frame buffer, that Shadertoy is missing at the moment, I thought it’d be interesting try it to have the image converging over time. A little hacking later, a minute or so worth of rendering got me this kind of result: Given the effort, I am really pleased by the result.

Path tracing, 40 samples per pixel, 5 bounces

Path tracing, unknown number of samples per pixel, 7 bounces

A raytracer under a hundred lines of C++

On his website Kevin Beason presents a Monte Carlo ray tracer written with 99 lines of C++, generating a picture of a Cornell box with global illumination. Beyond the interesting experiment and the fact it can generate a binary of 4kB, I find very valuable the fact there are slides explaining all the code.

Epsilon, a 64k intro by Mercury

Last weekend the demogroup Mercury released at Tokyo Demo Fest the final version of their invitation to the upcoming Revision party: a 64kB demo called Epsilon. While the complexity of the scenes is very limited, the rendering, seemingly a raymarching shader, features a couple of very noteworthy real-time effects including ambient occlusion, reflexion (up to two iterations it seems) and refraction, caustics, and an hexagonal bokeh depth of field.