Honestly, once we have a suitable HMD (aka. VR goggles), we can use a cluster of raytracers to experiment with actual photorealistic reality. My previous best g

Honestly, once we have a suitable HMD (aka. VR goggles), we can use a cluster of raytracers to experiment with actual photorealistic reality. My previous best guess would have been a clustered version of Luxrender, but most recent projections of mine yielded ~20MW of current-gen CPU cluster (with a hint of GPU (about 3:1 electrical CPU:GPU) to offload ray intersection for a 2~3x speed boost) as what would be needed to feed a display that can reach the far end of uncanny valley as far as the visuals themselves go. This would be _expensive_ and quite likely considered a useless waste of computing, but I seriously think we should try to get to the point where we can do this. And it truly requires ray tracing to handle the vast amount of detail the scene would require. Also testing scales much better down to a workstation for photorealism than for textured and shaded polygon technology. The main reason is just that most of ray tracing is parallel, save for sequential tracing of each individual ray. The result is that much more of the behavior is scale-free which enables you to test materials much quicker/more interactively than with shaded polygons. The other part of that is how a material's behavior doesn't depend on other/nearby objects as much, so you can mock those better and have few surprises as far as their interaction is concerned. Luxrender specifically was used years ago for such things as rendering imaged for a iirc. perfume bottle catalogue, as it was easier to specify the material properties and adapt for the colors/opacities and label prints than to get regular, symmetrical photos from a photographer in a studio. The requirement was that the realism allowed skipping a disclaimer about the images not being photographs. And that implies confidence in the mathematical models used in the "simulation". RTX cards might allow porting Luxrender in a way that retains it's spectral treatment that actually physically simulated a dispersive prism generating a rainbow from a ray of white light, without more than specifying the dispersion of the glass. It goes without saying that such effects are inherently very noisy, but there might be ways using automatic differentiation (c.f. Julia (language)) combined with advanced numerical integration to make use of calculus to reduce the noise in individual samples. If anyone knows about attempts to combine Metropolis light transport (MLT) with automatic differentiation or just about a more concrete idea to incorporate advanced numerical integration with MLT, or a potentially suitable MLT implementation in Julia, please let me know, i'd like to check it out and actually consider it a suitable "toy" project for learning Julia. The ease of efficient GPU use from this high level just allows so much flexibility in e.g. complex material node graphs getting handled with no extra work on the integrator then.