Abstract :
Ray tracing has been an active area of computer graphics research for about three decades. While somewhat quiet in the 1990s, ray tracing has seen a resurgence in the last few years. According to googlepsilas scholar database, Whittedpsilas classic paper received more citations in 2007 than in any previous year. This is in spite of the decreasing likelihood of citations to Whittedpsilas paper within modern ray tracing papers; barely a quarter of the papers in the 2007 Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing cited that paper. As many new researchers are entering the field, it would be beneficial to have a clean and consistently used set of terms for describing ray tracing algorithms. While one approach to generating a common use for terms would be an official working group, that would add delay and is probably overkill. I witnessed the physically-based rendering community fail to standardize terms such as ldquoradiosityrdquo which may or may not imply a finite-element method, and that experience convinced me that any referenceable standard is better than none. This work aims to be such a referenceable standard.
