Note that it is using canvas 2d rather than canvas 3d (aka WebGL[1]).
But if you take ray casting to extreme, you end up with Ray Tracing[2], which is kinda expensive. Which is why we had such an effusive conversation a few months ago about hardware accelerated RayTracing[3].
Yes, however the raycasting is drawing pixel by pixel. That part is not hardware accelerated, and that is the expensive part. That is that part that shaders speedup a lot, by delegating a lot of the work to the GPU.
That page froze my browser (Firefox 29) and started leaking oodles of memory until I killed it (along with a bunch of other shit I was working on), so I guess I'll count that as a point in favor of software raycasting.
Note that it is using canvas 2d rather than canvas 3d (aka WebGL[1]).
But if you take ray casting to extreme, you end up with Ray Tracing[2], which is kinda expensive. Which is why we had such an effusive conversation a few months ago about hardware accelerated RayTracing[3].
A sample ray traced scene from AlteredQualia[4] (2nd largest[5] contributor to the famous Three.js Library): http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/raytracer_sandbox_re...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/WebGL/Getting_s...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7425303
[4] https://github.com/alteredq
[5] https://github.com/mrdocob/three.js/graphs/contributors