Animation using accelerated ray tracing on a hypercube

Ray-tracing is an image synthesis method producing some of the most photorealistic images to date. The method is taken from classical optics, where rays of light are traced around a scene inside the computer and results are plotted into the resulting image. This simple technique enables refraction, reflection and shadowing to be created in the same algorithm. The drawback, however, is that the method is very computationally expensive, and hence requires accelerating to enable images to be produced in a reasonable time. Most of the time spent in any ray-tracing algorithm is spent in ray-object intersection tests, so techniques to accelerate the ray tracing process have concentrated on this problem. Two acceleration techniques are investigated, those of parallelism and temporal coherence