Computer-generated images of black holes are invaluable tools for science, teaching, and entertainment. Nevertheless, up until recently, real-time imagery of situations with extreme space-time curvature were not possible. The paper Interactive Black-Hole Visualization by Verbraeck and Eisemann changed this.
This work follows their line of research, building upon an adaptive grid-based rendering approach. Additionally, it includes the support of an accretion disk with realistic coloration and grid-interpolation, enables full free movement around the black hole and uses stereoscopic imagery to simulate depth. By carefully arranging the computations, a speed-up of up to 8 times over previous work was achieved for the grid generation, which enables a full real-time exploration of the black-hole space-time distortion.

This paper accelerates the rendering of diffusion curves using the ray tracing cores found on modern NVIDIA graphics cards using the method described by Bowers et al. [Bowers, Leahey and Wang 2011]. This method approximates the final result of the Poisson equation and in this paper is accelerated using Optix and dedicated ray tracing hardware. Using this method yielded a render time decrease of around 8 times between the Quadro P1000 and RTX 2060, while retaining the complex colour gradients and ease of use of traditional diffusion curves solved using the Poisson equation.