Adapting Ray Tracing to Spatial Augmented Reality

Ray tracing is an elegant and intuitive image generation method. The introduction of GPU-accelerated ray tracing and corresponding software frameworks makes this rendering technique a viable option for Augmented Reality applications. Spatial Augmented Reality employs projectors to illuminate physical models and is used in fields that require photorealism, such as design and prototyping. Ray tracing can be used to great effect in this Augmented Reality environment to create scenes of high visual fidelity. However, the peculiarities of SAR systems require that core ray tracing algorithms be adapted to this new rendering environment. This paper highlights the problems involved in using ray tracing in a SAR environment and provides solutions to overcome them. In particular, the following issues are addressed: ray generation, hybrid rendering and view-dependent rendering.