refractio

You could fill that void with glass with a different index of refraction, but that would only make the thing heavier, not smaller.

> The reflection and refraction raytracing is all hard-coded for the geometry in the scene, which makes it really easy. Which reminds me...

The reflection and refraction raytracing is all hard-coded for the geometry in the scene, which makes it really easy. It's just a simple sphere and box intersection test.

You compensate for drift during your measurements, for dip and refraction, you solve the equations for several celestial bodies etc.

Assuming this experiment is done in a vacuum, I've never heard of a static electric field changing the index of refraction of a vacuum.

Probably not how it was done, but is it possible to craft a bottle in such a way that the refraction index makes the content appear larger than it actually is?

The cornea, not the lens, supplies the majority of the eye's refraction, so I would be surprised if this worked for people with any substantial amount of refractive error.

One that got note in the press a few years ago has a negative index of refraction. Panchromaticity could be accomplished via a color array scheme similar to what is already common in lithographic optic devices.

Ionospheric refraction increases path lengths between users and satellites." !

To top that off, ray tracing can do proper refraction, proper ambient occlusion, interactive indirect illumination and a few other nice effects. Altogether this means one thing: stepping closer towards realism.

Simple refraction of sunlight, explains Moser, as he fills an empty two-litre plastic bottle." I agree that it does involve poking a hole through the ceiling, but the thing's simplicity belies its utility and what may seem "obvious" after the fact doesn't make it any less significant an invention.

Most old lenses are not achromat or apochromat, so different wavelengths of light get refracted with different indices of refraction. In black-and-white photography, the colour fringes near the edges simply show up as being slightly blurry, so it's not as big of a deal as in modern colour photography.

Just off the cuff, though, the speed of sound is lower at low temperature, so refraction of a sound wave in the upper atmosphere will tend to bend it outward, away from the Earth. I'm thus imagining that loud sounds may tend to locally push the atmosphere out from the planet a little bit, and I expect that coming back to equilibrium will be a lossy process that doesn't preserve the shape of the wave.

Usually this breaks down into a combination of how much ambient light you're simulating, the material properties of the surface, the results of any reflection/refraction rays you fire off, and the effect of light sources on it. The simplest way to calculate the light sources is to follow another ray to each of your light sources, and if there's nothing in the way, you add the intensity of that light to the pixel.