The final project is to implement and report on an addition to your ray tracer from a published journal article.
Choose a published journal article that describes a feature that could be added to your ray tracing program. Some suggestions are: curved surfaces, global illumination, displacement maps, participating media, and unrealistic rendering. You do not have to implement the entirety of the paper you choose. It would be sufficient to take a key aspect and modify it to fit into your ray tracing program. The paper you choose, however, must be approved.
The primary goal of the paper is to report on the feature that you have chosen to add to your ray tracer. You can assume the reader is already familiar with the journal article you choose to implement. The paper should be image driven. That is, it should contain images, produced with your ray tracer, that illustrate your final project program with descriptions of the images. For example it could have pairs of images, one image rendered with your final project addition and one without. Each pair of images could have a paragraph describing the qualitative differences of the images. Don't be afraid to include images that illustrate weaknesses in the feature that you implemented.
The primary goal of the presentation is to report on the journal article that you have chosen to implement for an audience that is familiar with computer graphics. The presentation should not only address what the article is about, but also why it is useful. The presentation should include slides of images from the paper that illustrate the article's details and images from your ray tracer that illustrate the article's results.
Submit your code in a tar file along with your paper and presentation slides on the course Inquire site.