An Interactive Program for Automating Optical Ray Tracing

Abstract

The goal of my Senior Individualized Project was to design and code a Pascal program which helps Optics students develop an intuition for ray tracing. Users can graphically manipulate an object-lens system and observe the effects of these manipulations in real time. This paper documents the result of this design effort discussing implementation decisions and the rational upon which those decisions were based. The processing concept is not machine dependent and could be implemented on many small computers. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I view the 512 K Macintosh computer to be the minimum acceptable equipment configuration considering the complexity of the task.