Photo-realistic rendering methods are required to achieve a convincing combination of real and synthetic scene parts in mixed reality applications. Ray tracing is a long time proved candidate, but when it comes to interactive frame rates GPU based rendering has usually been preferred. Recent advances in distributed interactive ray tracing suggest to explore also its potential for mixed reality ...

This survey reviews algorithms that can render specular, i.e. mirror reflections, refractions, and caustics on the GPU. We establish a taxonomy of methods based on the three main different ways of representing the scene and computing ray intersections with the aid of the GPU, including ray tracing in the original geometry, ray tracing in the sampled geometry, and geometry transformation. Having...

In this paper we present an acceleration method for volumetric ray tracing which utilizes standard graphics hardware without compromising image accuracy. The graphics hardware is employed to ident@ those segments of each ray that could possibly contribute to the jinal image. A volumetric ray tracing algorithm is then used to compute the$nal image, traversing only the identi$ed segments of the r...

Ray-based simulations have been shown to generate impressively realistic ultrasound images in interactive frame rates. Recent efforts used GPU-based surface ray-tracing to simulate complex ultrasound interactions such as multiple reflections and refractions. These methods are restricted to perfectly specular reflections (i.e., following only a single reflective/refractive ray), whereas real tis...

We present novel algorithms to achieve interactive high-quality illumination with hard and soft shadows in complex models. Our approach combines the efficiency of rasterization-based approaches with the accuracy of a ray tracer. We use conservative image-space bounds to identify only a small subset of the pixels in the rasterized image and perform selective ray tracing on those pixels. The algo...

We present the surface area traversal order (SATO) metric to accelerate shadow ray traversal. Our formulation uses the surface area of each child node to compute the TO. In this metric, we give a traversal priority to the child node with the larger surface area to quickly find occluders. Our algorithm reduces the pre-processing overhead significantly, and is much faster than other metrics. Over...