inTrace GmbH

The intellectual roots of inTrace go back to Prof. Philipp Slusallek, head of the Computer Graphics department at Saarland University. During his visit at Stanford University's Graphics Lab in 1998 and 1999 he and Prof. Pat Hanrahan started to research the question why ray-tracing hadn't kept up with the promises some experts had expected due to the theoretical advantages that it has compared to other techniques.

After Prof. Slusalleks return to the Computer Graphics Lab in Saarbrücken he directed the research towards the speed-up of the software implementation of Ray-Tracing. An important part in this research was contributed by Ingo Wald, co-founder of inTrace. Within the scope of his PhD thesis he achieved a speed-up by a factor of 15, in the first year! Scalability and integration in a network were easily integrated, as well as the support for massive scenes. Critical in that area were contributions from Carsten Benthin in the context of his diploma thesis. He continues the research with a PhD thesis at the Graphics Lab in Saarbrücken.

The industrial benefits of the work was recognised at an early stage and after about a year the software was totally redesigned, in order to ensure usability by a broad audience, robustness and extensibility. First results regarding the research of interactive Global Illumination could therefore easily be integrated.

The resulting, revolutionary software was first presented on fairs and conferences around the world in March 2002. The response - especially by large companies in the aerospacial, automotive and industrial sectors - was tremendous. Soon the interest in the new technology went beyond the scope of a university project. As a result inTrace GmbH was founded in March 2003.

First copies of the realtime ray-tracer now called "inView" were sold. The young company had a successfull first year and the number of employees has risen from zero to 2. In December 2003 the management was taken over by Michael Scherbaum in the position of CEO and Ingo Wald as CTO, who want to further expand the company and ensure its success in the years to come.

Many new customers joined inTrace's user base and in 2004 Volkswagen invested 20 Million Euros in two corporate visualisation centers which are also driven by inTrace's interactive Ray Tracing technology. In 2006 the company was awarded the European IST Prize for its innovative products.