Ray tracing (graphics)

Turner Whitted's recursive ray tracing, presented at SIGGRAPH in 1979 Whitted's paper, An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display, stored a tree of rays for every pixel: from the eye to the first surface hit, then onward to other surfaces and to the lights. Following those bounces simulated true reflection, refraction and shadows together in one algorithm, and anti-aliasing was built into the same visibility calculation. That is the image most people picture when they hear ray tracing: glass, mirrors and crisp shadows that fall out of the physics rather than being painted in, and the root of the story that ends with ray tracing running live on a graphics card.