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by hollasch 924 days ago
For various reasons, I was preoccupied with three different thoughts in 2005: the Euler equation (relating vertices, edges and faces), transforming planes with 4x4 matrices, and trying to optimize ray-triangle intersection. On the way to a company meeting, I was sitting on a bus, looking out the window, watching the scenery go by while turning these three topics around in my head. These pieces (which I didn't think were really related) suddenly started fitting together, and I came up with a radically new way of testing ray intersection against an object defined by a mesh of triangles. It ended up being successful beyond my biggest hopes. Eventually got patented by Microsoft, but the patent's now expired. Still my proudest discovery.
3 comments

That's pretty cool, I'd also love to see this patent even though I'm not likely to understand much of it
Awesome! Can you please link to your expired patent or related articles?
I can imagine that your brain was developing those neuron paths for a while, but on that bus, in that moment, the paths related to these topics have finally met!