This feature adds a new perspective as well as a little interaction
to ray traced scenes.
First the scene is ray traced using a fish eye camera sweeping the
whole scene 360 degrees (both vertically and horizontally).
Then, the scene is mapped onto a ball whitch can be rolled interactively
(in real time) to let the user observe the whole scene.
*The point light source is visible in the scene (don't look right at it!). This was done by eliminating the specular component of the lighting model and instead, for each ray traced, adding a light component depending on the angle to the light. Notice that the specular effect obtained in this picture is the same as the others. It is obtained implicitly (i.e.: if the depth of reflections is 1 no specular effect appears).
Here the space shuttle in the background is chrome but the effect is not perfect because, to accelerate rendering, the depth of reflections was lowered to 2.
The tarmac is modeled by mapping a bit map onto the plane reproduced an infinite number of times.
The sky is produced by replacing black (the color obtained when a ray does not intersect an object) by a shade of blue depending on the angle to the vertical.
Here the object is a mushroom, notice the object appears chiseled like a diamond because it is made up of distinct polygons and the normals to the surface are not interpolated.
Anti-aliasing.
