In 2022, several other students contributed to it with various extensions (such as porting it to mobile and web and gamifying the tool). Verschoore de la Houssaije under the supervision of Jiri Kosinka and Steffen Frey in the Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics group of the Bernoulli Institute at the University of Groningen. Virtual Ray Tracer started in 2021 as a BSc thesis project collaboration of Chris S. It is very rewarding to see others use, enjoy, and learn from our tool. This also makes it easy to deploy demos of Virtual Ray Tracer, such as the one that will be shown at the European Researchers’ Night / Zpanned Zernike event in the Forum in Groningen in a few weeks’ time. As an example, we are now actively exploring the option to combine Virtual Ray Tracer with the RePiX VR environment for graphics (but not ray tracing) learning in virtual reality, developed at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, conveniently also in Unity.įurthermore, having Virtual Ray Tracer freely available as a web tool and on Google Play gives us the opportunity to easily showcase it and share it with not only students, but also other interested parties. Although producing the tool would have been considerably faster had we used restrictively licensed components, we strongly believe the extra effort to keep it fully open has been worth it and will lead to many future benefits. This meant that some components had to be replaced by alternatives with an MIT licence or even reimplemented by ourselves. Unity offers many extensions, but only a portion of those meets the requirements of MIT licensing. At the same time, this led to challenges regarding keeping the tool open source. This meant that we could focus on the novelty of our tool, rather than on reinventing the wheel. We have thus decided to build Virtual Ray Tracer on the freely available and cross-platform game engine Unity. Lessons learnedīuilding an advanced graphics tool from scratch is no small feat. The tool remains under active development and we stay committed to providing all future versions as open source, too. The open research practices used (both for the tool and the paper) have opened up many future possibilities, including for universities, teaching programmes, research groups, or even interested enthusiasts from the general public, to freely use the tool, modify it to suit their needs, or build on it further. Our motivation was to build an educational graphics tool that can be used not only by us in our courses and research, but also way beyond that. The whole Virtual Ray Tracer project was set up as an open-source initiative. The tool is now actively being used in the Computer Graphics course at the University of Groningen.
#REPIX FOR COMPUTER FULL#
This way, students of computer graphics as well as graphics enthusiasts from the general public can take full advantage of it. The accompanying paper is freely available in the Eurographics Digital Library. We have made Virtual Ray Tracer an open-source project, freely available on GitHub.
#REPIX FOR COMPUTER CODE#
The paper and the tool (including its source code under the permissive MIT licence and a Google Play app) are openly available online (see the links below).
#REPIX FOR COMPUTER SOFTWARE#
To freely disseminate Virtual Ray Tracer, we have published a software paper on it in the education track at the Eurographics conference in 2022. We set out to create an open-source tool which students of graphics, but also members of the general public, can use to learn how ray tracing works and how it leads to the high-quality images and animations we are so used to nowadays. This makes it a fundamental method that is taught in most, if not all, computer graphics courses. Ray tracing is used in animated films, and now increasingly also in real-time applications such as computer games, to bring digital characters and scenes to life. Our idea for Virtual Ray Tracer, an application for visualising the ray tracing process in computer graphics, was born about two years ago.
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