I thought I'd share some things I came across and see if anyone has other
links. I'm a game programmer professionally, and I'm very interested in
real-time raytracing on the side. I'm especially looking forward to the
next generation of game consoles, since I think they will be up to the
task of allowing the first comercially produced real-time raytraced game.

As far as I know, there are two real-time raytraced games in existance:

RTChess:
http://www.newimage.com/~rhk/rtchess/

AntiPlanet:
http://www.virtualray.ru/eng/news.html

And one in the works:
http://www.realstorm.com/Screenshots.html

Has anyone seen any others?

Also, one gap that I can see is research on animating characters with
non-rigid vertex weighting (meaning a vertex can be influenced by 2 or
more bones in the skeleton). Does anyone know of research into
appropriate bounding structures for such a character? What I imagine
would be necessary would be to also animate on demand -- only characters
that are rendered would be animated at all, and only the bones that
correspond to the rendered polys would be animated. Unfortunately, I
haven't seen any research addressing these issues yet, and it seemms like
a difficult (though solvable) problem.

Greg