Peter Shirley’s Ray Tracing in One Weekend is one of the finest introductory texts that I’ve had the fortune to read. The material is well presented and the project that Mr. Shirley walks us through is wonderful.

I implemented it some years ago in Rust and have just completed the first entry in the series in Swift Playgrounds through the medium of a metal shader. This was quite the learning experience and while I’m sure there many performance gains to be had, getting it to work at all was a fantastic challenge.

I wanted to make it render in real time as an improvement over my original implementation which focused on generating a single image.