Interactive realism for visualization using ray tracing

Visual realism is necessary for many virtual reality applications. In order to convince the user that the virtual environment is real, the scene presented should faithfully model the expected actual environment. A highly accurate, fully modeled, interactive environment is thus seen as "virtually real". The paper addresses the problem of interactive visual realism and discusses a possible solution: a hybrid rendering paradigm that ties distributed graphics hardware and ray tracing systems together for use in interactive, high visual realism applications. This new paradigm is examined in the context of a working rendering system. This system is capable of producing images of higher fidelity than possible through the use of graphics hardware alone, able both to render images at speeds useful for interactive systems and to progressively refine static, high quality snapshots.