For the past two years, Holochip has been working on light field technology for the US Navy’s Aegis program. The program calls for a table top light field display that can accommodate horizontal and vertical real-time parallax. In October 2020, the team working on OpenXR™ at Holochip released an open source Vulkan® example project and started work with light field display technology using the OpenXR API. As a result of both efforts, Holochip has discovered a method of light field real-time rendering that is built upon the Khronos Group’s Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions.

The Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Task Sub Group (TSG) has developed and released a set of extensions that seamlessly integrate ray tracing functionality into the existing Vulkan framework. This blog summarizes how the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions were developed, and illustrates how they can be used by developers to bring ray tracing functionality to their applications.

Today the Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Task Sub Group (TSG) is announcing the public release of the provisional Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions. The Ray Tracing TSG was formed in early 2018 and tasked to bring a tightly integrated, cross-vendor, ray tracing solution to Vulkan, this release marks the culmination of the first phase of the TSG’s mandate.