Raytracing from first principles with Alexander Vandenbroucke

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Raytracing is a rendering technique, i.e. a way to show a 3D world on a flat screen. The ideas behind raytracing are simple and easy to understand, while also being a very flexible technique that is easy to extend. This makes raytracing an ideal topic for a small Haskell project. Moreover, the fact that the code produces and immediate, tangible, result makes this project enormously rewarding.

This session explains how to implement a simple ray tracer in about 300 lines of code, from the basic principles (geometry,vectors,etc) to more advanced topics such as lighting, and in addition illustrate how to implement these ideas in a functional style, in Haskell.

The format is still in flux, but will likely feature some live coding. Of note, the author is not by any means a computer graphics expert, so the session does not assume any prior knowledge. This session has a practical focus, and all code will be made available on-line.