(Yes, I finally saw Casablanca a couple of weeks ago.) Exhibit A: the first meaningful image produced by my raytracer for CS 488 Assignment 4. It's a binary intersection image; it shoots a single ray from the eye through each pixel, rendering it white iff the ray intersects an object. I'll tackle Phong lighting next. For those outside the Graphics/CS bubble, Phong lighting is a relatively crude but efficient way to model the way light interacts with objects. As you can see from the Wikipedia page, it allows us to shade surfaces, thereby giving the impression of depth.
In general, raytracing is an attempt to model the way vision works. Production-quality raytracers will model reflection, refraction, transparency, scattered reflection from rough surfaces, and any number of other real-world phenomena to impart as much realism as possible to the final image. Maybe I'm strange, but I think that's cool - thanks to CS 488, I now have an appreciation for exactly how much programmer effort and CPU time go into, say, Pixar's rendering pipeline. (6-90 CPU-hours per frame, according to their site!)
One last note: although the raytracer project is by no means large, it's hefty enough that ad-hoc cp -r source control won't cut it. To that end, I've decided to give Git a spin. First impressions are positive: it's fast in all the ways that Subversion isn't, and it's ridiculously easy to set up over SSH.
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