| Product Name: |
Raytrace |
| Level: |
First Year Tertiary / Second Year Tertiary |
| Platform: |
PC - Windows® |
| Supplied Information: |
Raytrace is an educational raytracing program for teaching geometrical optics. |
| Possible Use: |
This product is suitable for First Year Tertiary / Second Year Tertiary courses for use by students in laboratory classes. |
| Price: |
$95 |
| Developer/s: |
Dr Ian Moore, Queensland University of Technology |
| Review: |
Raytrace is clearly an educational tool, not a general purpose ray tracing program and does not provide some of the capabilities of such programs. Nevertheless, the facilities it does provide are quite impressive and it could be a very useful teaching tool if used intelligently. The program can be mastered by an instructor within a day or two (familiarity with CAD software may help). In my opinion it is too complex to present to an average 1st or 2nd year student for a brief lab or tutorial session. It would be suitable if the student has enough time to master the basic operations, as in some form of project. The scripting capabilities illustrated in the demonstration provided with the program provide a means of tailoring the extensive program capabilities to the student capabilities. The students could do most of the work by following the directions provided by the script, which would also allow some of the most time consuming details to be simply provided. The scripting is a new feature documented in the on-line help, but not yet in the manual. It is essential that it be comprehensively documented to allow instructors to use it. Generating shapes such as lenses is a little tricky. Drawing the curves is somewhat non-intuitive and there is plenty of room for students to make a mistake and waste time. These more complex figures could be better drawn by a script or simply provided in a new library generated by the instructor. The other obvious way to overcome these drawing difficulties is to specify a figure using numbers (e.g. surface radii, spacings etc...) provided in an input file. This capability is common in general ray tracing programs, but would still be a valuable addition to Raytrace for those circumstances where it is actually easier than drawing the figures. One other small addition would be an explicit menu item to cancel any current operation. Although ESC will do this, you need to know this and there is no menu item the user can find corresponding to it. Having mentioned some reservations, Raytrace is an excellent program. Among its most attractive features is the ability to move rays or sources or change refractive indices and immediately see the effect, including changes in distances and angles. Another is the ability to trace around an object and see the corresponding aberrated image traced out. In summary, Raytrace can be a valuable teaching tool if implemented with appropriate assistance for the inexperienced student. It provides many more features than the programs which we currently use in our first year laboratory. It is also better suited to lecture demonstrations than programs we have used. |
|
Dr John O'Byrne, School of Physics, University of Sydney, obyrne@physics.usyd.edu.au |
| |
| Supplier: |
IME Software, PO Box 1133 Toowong QLD 4066 |
|
imesoft@ozemail.com.au |
|
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~imesoft |
| Date Record Last Modified: |
12/6/97 |
