Virtual Ray Tracer

About Virtual Ray Tracer

Virtual Ray Tracer is a Unity application that visualizes ray tracing. The application shows a scene with a camera, lights and objects. Rays slowly shoot from the camera and interact with the lights and objects in the scene. Users can change the settings of the ray tracer and material properties of the objects and see how this affects the rays traced in real-time. The application comes with a number of scenes that walk the user through the settings and controls of the application as well as several ray tracing concepts.

Virtual Ray Tracer was created by Chris van Wezel and Willard Verschoore as a graduation project for their Computing Science Bachelor's degree programme at the University of Groningen. The project was proposed and supervised by Jiri Kosinka and Steffen Frey in the SVCG research group. The application was built to aid students of the Computer Graphics course at the University of Groningen by providing them with an interactive introduction to the principles of ray tracing. A user study conducted at the end of the project found positive results. This success inspired the supervisors of the project to write a paper in collaboration with Chris and Willard.

The adaptation of the original Virtual Ray Tracer application to this mobile version has been done by Roan Rosema.