- Akira Fujimoto
]
He earned BS and MS degrees in engineering from the
University of Szczecin , Poland and PhD from theUniversity of Tokyo . Since 1981 he worked forGrafica Computer Corporation , leaving it in 1986 to form his own company.In 1985 he developed the first commercially feasible rendering software system called ARTS (Accelerated Ray Tracing System), based on
ray tracing technique. This had become possible due to his development of a method for speeding up inherently slow ray tracing by several orders of magnitude for complex real-life scenes. The ARTS system used acceleration of ray tracing based on the uniform subdivision of the space into "voxel s" and their efficient traversal. [James Arvo, David Kirk, "A Survey of Ray Tracing Acceleration Techniques" In:Andrew Glassner (ed.) (1989) "An Introduction to Ray Tracing", ISBN 0122861604, p.223.]His company, Integra, continued development of rendering software in close cooperation with the scientists from the company Voxel in his homeland city of
Szczecin where the TBT (Turbo Beam Tracing ) software was developed. [Akira Fujimoto, "Turbo Beam Tracing – A Physically Accurate Lighting Simulation Environment", "Knowledge Based Image Computing Systems", pp. 1–5,May 20 ,1988 ] This fact was the base of allegations in industrial espionage, because thecounter-intelligence section of the Japanese police had found it impossible to believe that such an advanced software had been produced in Poland. This sensational spy story swept over Japanese newspapers in 1987 with titles like "The Shadow of theKGB in the center ofTokyo " (the headquarters of the company were in theToshima-ku district of Tokyo). At these times, theStrategic Defense Initiative was the word of the day, and to some, the terms "ray tracing" and "ray casting" sounded very dangerous. It took several years to clear up the misunderstanding. [Akira Fujimoto and Nancy Hays, "Mission Impossible: High Tech Made in Poland", "IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications", vol. 12, No. 2, March 1992, pp. 8–11.]References
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