Rendered or real? Real-time ray tracing makes cars look convincingly realistic.

The hyper-realistic reflection of light on the ground in front of the car should've given it away, but I was so distracted by the realness of everything else that I didn't pick up on the clues that the BMW 8 series coupe I was looking at wasn't the real thing.

San Francisco-based Unity Technologies general manager Tim McDonough had given me this challenge via video chat. On the screen, he showed me three sets of side-by-side images of a BMW car on a stage. Some of the images I was looking at had been created in virtual reality, using the 3D imaging tools on the Unity Technologies platform with Nvidia software processing to make a photo of a car look like the car was actually on a stage. I had to guess which was the real car and which was made through a Unity ray-traced rendering. Read more...