Real-Time Interactive Platform-Agnostic Volumetric Path Tracing in WebGL 2.0

Path tracing has become a de facto standard for photo-realistic rendering due to its conceptual and algorithmic simplicity. Over the last few years, it has been successfully applied to the rendering of participating media, although it has not seen widespread adoption. Most implementations are targeted at specific platforms or hardware, which makes them difficult to deploy or extend. However, recent advancements in web technologies enable us to access graphics hardware from a web browser in a platform-agnostic manner. Therefore, in this paper, we present an implementation of a state-of-the-art volumetric path tracer developed in JavaScript using WebGL 2.0. The presented solution supports the use of arbitrary 2D transfer functions and heterogeneous volumetric data, aims to be interactive, platform-agnostic, easily extensible, and runs in real-time both on desktop and mobile devices.