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.