Tracing rays with the area sampling machine

The area sampling buffer concept unifies the three types of sampling functionalities (pixel-area sampling, secondary direction sampling, and light-source area sampling) of a ray tracer with the scan-conversion process. The Area Sampling Machine is a parallel computing system with custom processing units designed to take advantage of these merged properties. This paper age of these merged properties. This paper first describes the architecture of the Area Sampling Machine and then present our simulation results. A successful implementation of the Area Sampling Machine would speed up ray-tracing style image generation processes with the mature hardware technology of Z-buffer scan conversion.