To make a long story short…
SoftByte Labs, Inc. was founded by Michael Purkhardt on July 12, 1993 and provided medical software (developed by Mr. Purkhardt) for hospitals and physicians. SoftByte Labs also engineered and developed robotic equipments (also engineered by Mr. Purkhardt) for specialized industrial and prototyping needs, such as robot arms and toys. Mr. Purkhardt decided to gear the company towards the software industry and eventually to 3D visualization, which resulted in the creation of Raylectron.
Mr. Purkhardt is an engineer in electronics, mechanics and an architect, and, loves chess (ELO rating of 2080), but the best part of him is Computer Science and software development from which all of the software provided by his company are his creation, including Raylectron.
Raylectron took many years of research and testing. Creating such software is not an easy task. While Raytracing exist already for many years prior to Raylectron, they are not photorealistic. To achieve photorealism, tracing the light path to illuminate the objects in a scene requires the understanding of the law of physics, such as photons and how they interact with the surface of the object they hit. In real life, photons travel at the speed of light, hence everything is illuminated almost instantly (to our perception). But as a computer program, this can not be done so easily. First, speed is a big issue. Computers do not calculate anywhere near the speed of light. Furthermore, the mathematics involved is extremely complex.
With all this said, we hope it wasn’t too short (better than too big and boring!)
~the end~