Adshir: Using Ray Tracing For Better AR Quality

[scolaner]

A small company called Adshir promises to bring ray tracing to AR, thus significantly increasing the quality of the images we see.

Adshir: Using Ray Tracing For Better AR Quality : Read more

 

[derekullo]

The better question is how is the 1/25 scale Allosaurus going to drink the water out of those narrow glasses?

Maybe that is why he looks so angry

 

[bit_user]

Cool, but why limit it to AR? I really want to see raytraced VR. And if their algorithm truly scales (big "if", there), it should fly on desktop hardware. Of course, given what they were saying about doing away with conventional scene graph traversal methods, it's quite possible that it won't scale to match conventional rasterization in VR environments.

I think a key point is that they seem to be assuming the lighting and environment can be learned with sufficient precision and accuracy. IMO, this is possibly a harder problem to do well than the actual rendering part.

I think AR needs to work pretty robustly, to gain acceptance. It's no use having graphics that are more realistic in tightly constrained scenarios, if they look glitchy and wrong in more real-world cases. Therefore, I expect most apps will opt for slightly less realism, in favor of fewer glitches and less flickering.

 

[bit_user]

It’s often used in rendering animations for films.

I'm not up-to-speed on the rendering techniques currently used in the film industry, but I know this is historically false. Indeed, the 2009 article to which you linked says this:

First of all, many gamers think that ray tracing is intrinsically a better algorithm than rasterization because "it's what the movies use." That's false. The majority of films using synthesized images (and all of Pixar's) use an algorithm called REYES that's based on rasterization.

Of course, it goes on to add a qualification, but at least I felt vindicated.

That said, I like ray tracing. It has a certain elegance to it, even if most of its benefits can be hacked into polygon-based rasterizers.

Before Apple scuttled their arrangement with Imagination, I was really hoping they'd bring it into the mainstream by including it in their next iPhone. With their direct control over the hardware & APIs for such a large phone market, they could've moved the industry, all by themselves. Even Google couldn't do that.