> what is up?? My name is Abe Heckenbach, and I am a newbie to these newsgroups.
> I have only recently(past 3 months) gotten into ray tracing, and I think is is
> awesome(Who doesn't??). I am particularly interested in real-time ray tracing
> for the purpose of virtual reality.  Seems impossible... I know, but maybe its
> not, hardware is getting faster every day, and I'm sure there are software
> speed-ups that haven't been figured out yet(in fact I have a few ideas myself!)
> 
> I'm interested in joining the POV-team to discuss ray tracing techniques, and
> help develop povray(I'm kinda new the C programming also, but I catch on quick,
> actually my first C program was a ray tracer to test one of my ideas, but I
> have been programming other languages for years, like java(and before that
> perl,basic,unix shell scripts,ect.))
> 
> I would like to start a group, website and corresponding newsgroup, to discuss
> virtual reality, (everything necessary to a finished VRE Setup(hardware and
> software requirements), but completely from a theoretical point of view)
> If anyone is willing to host something like that let me know. If anyone is
> interested in any of this let me know, I would like to discuss it with people).

Real time ray tracing is impossible at this time with the Personnal Computers we
got...  You would probably need a super computer for this to be acheived...

The best thing you got is OpenGL (Open Graphics Library for the C++), it is a
"process of creating 2D renditions of 3D objects"[Foley/vanDam]...

You have acces to TONS and TONS and MEGATONS of good documentation about this
subject, also, keep in mind that OpenGL will never give you what POV-Ray can,
but it can do more that what you think, even in 3d gaming OpenGL has not been
used to it's maximal possibilities...

There is a newsgroup about OpenGL, but it's SGI oriented and you might prefer
the linux implementation MesaGL that has a mailing list...

Here, try www.Mesa3d.org and you should get more documentation, you can also
check out the links they got...  this should interest you!

Hope this helps,
	Simon

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