Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Molecules and ray-tracing

One of the limitations of high performance software is that it restricts itself to high-end machines. In a time of tablets and laptops, other solutions are needed. The idea is to send information such as mouse and keyboard events to the server. The server takes care of the rendering and sends a stream of images back to client. Transport is optimized using compression technologies, making it possible for every client to enjoy a different and fully customizable view of the protein.
 

I truly believe that ray tracing is the future of digital imaging and augmented reality. Being able to go much further than rasterization in terms of image quality, ray-tracing also makes it easy to compute, for example, the amount of light received by an object.



The nature of ray-tracing, and the techniques used for its implementation can be reused to run scenarios such as calculating interactions between atoms or determining what the surface of contact would be between two molecules.











Neuron morphologies and ray-tracing

3D models generated from neurons morphologies (http://neuromorpho.org) and rendered with my GPU accelerated path-tracing engine.



Experimenting with general purpose raytracer (feat. depth of field and ambient occlusion)