Statistical/Optical design ray tracing in Python

[Daniel Farrell]

Welcome to the group,

There has been a lot of interest in this tracing written in python
recently and many different groups are write code that does almost the
same thing. Statistical/Optical design ray tracing might also be know
as 'forward ray tracing'. The aim is not to produce a image but
introduce photons into the scene and record their statistics
(positions, wavelength, direction, phase etc.) until they are either
absorbed (and lost) or exit the scene. These techniques are used
mainly in design of optical systems, photovoltaics, solar energy etc.

As a community we have 3 projects (so far, my apologies if I haven't
found your project yet!),

http://github.com/jasminef/tracer/tree/optic_tests
http://bitbucket.org/bryancole/raytrace/overview/
http://www-ee.eng.hawaii.edu/~zqyun/rtplayground.html

Of interested might be the newly formed discussion group for Bryan
Cole's RayTrace project,
http://groups.google.com/group/python-raytrace

Please join in!

Daniel Farrell