Comments on: JavaScript Ray-Tracing: or The Worst Application of JavaScript Ever

By: Marc Breuer

Marc Breuer — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:29:58 +0000

Nice work on the raytracer. I’ve started working on something similar, but on a much simpler level. I am trying to find ways to boost performance to get spheres and shadows rendered in something like real time. could be too ambitious though :) … I wonder how far your raytracer could be simplified to improve performance. My current results aren’t all that positive.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:48:56 +0000

Excellent stuff! Ray-tracing is awesome. I fell in love with it 16-17 years ago when I stumbled across a computer magazine in the school library which contained a C program that rendered some spheres with different material properties (including refraction!). It would take half an hour to render a 320×200 image. Over the years I wrote a few of my own (rubbish) engines but I haven’t even thought about it for nearly a decade.

At the weekend I also decided to play with the Canvas element, and discovered the getImageData / putImageData methods which are supported in Firefox 2.0+, Opera 9.x and now in the latest nightly Safari builds. It’s a pretty cool way to do pixel-wise graphics. I spent the weekend writing a javascript raytracer (thinking I might be the first), purely to benchmark browser javascript speed. Looks like you were the first, by a long way :)

http://mark.webster.googlepages.com/jsrt.html

By: adam

adam — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:47:17 +0000

@Ahmed – Actually I walked into my first post-uni job interview with the intention of being a grown up Java programmer, working on enterprise systems and doing the hard core programming thing.

I interviewed with the company CEO, who saw my prior web-dev experience, and walked me over to the web-dev team within the company and said here’s your new boss, you start next week.

At that point I decided that I love the internet so much I might as well go with it :)

By: Ahmed Hilali

Ahmed Hilali — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:52:17 +0000

What made you switch to web developement after majoring in computer graphics? More jobs, etc?

By: Jagtesh Chadha

Jagtesh Chadha — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:18:40 +0000

Hi Adam!

This post was rather fascinating, since I too share a curiosity for ray-tracing (ever since I first used pov-ray a few years back). But seeing a working ray-tracer in JavaScript, my oh my..you’ve blown my mind off completely!

I like your blog. Keep up the good work :)