Abstract: Ray tracing is a popular technique for producing high-quality imagery. However, ray tracing is not typically used for interactive editing and viewing because of its computational cost. This paper presents a ray tracer that can be used for interactive scene editing; the user can edit the scene both by manipulating objects and changing the viewpoint.

Our system uses interpolants to accelerate ray tracing by approximating radiance. We build hierarchical ray segment trees (RSTs) to maintain information about the regions of 5D ray space that affect an interpolant. When the scene is edited, these ray segment trees are traversed to rapidly identify and update the interpolants that are affected by the edit.