One
of the limitations of high performance software is that it restricts
itself to high-end machines. In a time of tablets and laptops, other
solutions are needed. The idea is to send information such as mouse and
keyboard events to the server. The server takes care of the rendering
and sends a stream of images back to client. Transport is optimized
using compression technologies, making it possible for every client to
enjoy a different and fully customizable view of the protein.
I truly believe that ray tracing is the future of digital imaging and augmented reality. Being able to go much further than rasterization in terms of image quality, ray-tracing also makes it easy to compute, for example, the amount of light received by an object.
The
nature of ray-tracing, and the techniques used for its implementation
can be reused to run scenarios such as calculating interactions between
atoms or determining what the surface of contact would be between two
molecules.
