From the paper: "We use the rasterizer as a potentially-visible set optimization to iterate only over pixels
for which rays might intersect a voxel, and then execute a small ray tracer in the
pixel shader. That is, we “splat” billboards that give coarse visibility and compute
exact visibility in a pixel shader. This works for any pinhole perspective projection,
including eye rays and shadow rays, so we use it for the shadow map rendering pass
as well"<p>Neat - I used a similar technique [1] in the last iteration of Voxel Quest, but I only rasterized single points/pixels then raytraced them into filled cubes (was not efficient other than on fill rate). However I did not invent the technique (I'm not sure who did, but I first got the idea from talking to Florian Boesch [2])<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/717265068086308865" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/717265068086308865</a>
[2] <a href="http://codeflow.org" rel="nofollow">http://codeflow.org</a>
This is more useful than it might seem because many rendering techniques are sometimes implemented using voxel representations behind the scenes, like global illumination (indirect bounced light, so light bounces off a red wall to create a pale red glow on the ground, that sort of thing), shadowing, fluids, etc. The examples of Minecraft and LEGO given are direct applications but I suspect this will improve a lot of stuff.