introduction to ray tracing

Eric Haines descibes on his blog a book called Another Introduction to Ray Tracing. It is a collection of articles about different aspects of ray tracing. The different articles describe a variety of topics and have reference links like wikipedia.

overview of ray tracing

An overview of ray tracing is available at a siggraph web site. I'm looking into it as a way to learn some 3-d graphics math by applying it in a simple program. Unfortunately I'm expecting the images produced by such a simple program not to be very interesting.

The pictures at this site about terrain generation with ray marching do look interesting though, and the author claims that the code is simple as well. Also, the explanation of the method involves techniques similar to ray tracing.

First iPhone Application tutorial

With the wifi version of the iPad now available, I decided to try again to make my first iPhone app. Also, fortunately I had some extra time off from work with this being Easter weekend. So, I went over this tutorial for making a Hello World type of iPhone application. It has a bunch of stuff with gui building that seems to make it a worthwhile exercise. That is, it should be more useful than a tutorial that just displays some words on the screen. There are text boxes that take in strings, and a button that responds to tapping by displaying a message in a label control. In other words, it does some basic input and output together with event handling.