Interactive platform-agnostic real-time path tracing using web technologies

Abstract

Path tracing is the current de facto standard for photorealistic rendering, largely due to its conceptual and algorithmic simplicity. Lately it has been successfully applied to rendering of participating media and volumetric data, but it has not received much attention. In fact, most implementations target specific platforms or hardware to achieve better performance, and are therefore less extensible and more difficult to deploy. However, modern web browsers allow access to graphics hardware in a platform-independent manner. In this work, we present a modern implementation of volume path tracing developed in JavaScript and WebGL 2.0. Our solution supports arbitrary volume data and 2D transfer functions while being interactive, platform-agnostic, easily extensible and can run on both desktop and mobile devices in real time.