Catch some rays for better 3D visualization

Ray tracing is used by automotive, aerospace, defense, marine, advertising, architecture, and digital video professionals to improve 3D computer graphics. Specifically, scenes are mathematically produced by tracing individual light rays from the point of view back trough the image to determine if they intersect any objects. Mercury Computer Systems recently introduced OpenRTRT, a 3D image-rendering application that combines the results of ray tracing with the interactivity of conventional shaded surface 3D graphics. OpenRTRT features an optimized ray-tracing core engine, material libraries for textures, and an interactive 3D-viewer application. The software runs on multiple processors under both the Linux and Windows operating systems. OpenRTRT single developer licenses starts at $7,200 and cluster licenses starts at $50,000.