Computer Science Ray-Tracing Hack-a-thon

On October 25th, all of the students from CS 476, a capstone computer science class on computer graphics, gathered for a ‘hack-a-thon’ to work through a difficult assignment together with the professor of the class, Christopher Tralie. In the assignment, students wrote code to construct a real time “ray tracer,” or a computer program to simulate how light bounces around a virtual world and meets the eye, using a mix of the Javascript and GLSL programming languages. Students found this assignment to be very challenging and painful at times, but incredibly rewarding. Some of the results and participants are captured in this image gallery.
(NOTE: This assignment was heavily inspired by a recent assignment in Princeton’s computer graphics class, which is a modern version of the assignment Professor Tralie did a decade ago as a Princeton undergraduate in the same class).
-Christopher Tralie, Assistant Professor of Math and Computer Science