Interactive Exploration of Nonlinear Ray Casting with Rust and wgpu

Speaker: Niklas Korz

Description

Light is commonly assumed to travel linearly from source to destination. There are however cases where the path of light can be bent or distorted. In the case of black holes for example, the light is attracted by a very strong gravitational center. Heated air can change the direction of light through the varying refraction caused by the temperature transition from heat source to environment. Creating an interactive environment for exploration of such phenomena may help in understanding the images they bring to life.

Linon is an application that tries to create such an environment, rendering an interactive scene where the paths of camera rays are influenced by a user-defined function. For this, the wgpu graphics library is used in combination with WGSL compute shaders, performing a continuous evaluation of ray paths in a nonlinear field through 4th order Runge-Kutta integration.

Track

Games, Business & Art

Level

Intermediate