Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Kinect playground

Here is a simple video demonstrating the use of Microsoft's Kinect for realtime 3D fun:

Real-time ray-tracing

I've always been fascinated by computer images and my dream was to be able to create one of those with my own programs. After a few years of research, my goal is still the same. I started to draw 3D math functions with hidden and lighted faces using basic algorithms but it was not realistic enough to me. I've always been thinking that ray-tracing was the best technology ever so I decided to make my first ray-tracer on my last year of B.s.c. in computer studies. The first implementation was done in C++ and it used to take ages to compute a single image. But this was in the late 90's and things have changed in the recent years with the introduction of GPGPU programming. So yes, my old dreams have come true, thanks to nVidia, realtime ray-tracing can be acheived on modern graphics cards and beside is a sample of my first results. This 1024x768 image takes 15 milliseconds to compute on a GTX260 nVidia card... just unbeleivable... and it's not even optimized.

So keep in touch for new exciting updates :)