After years of silence, we are resuming updates of this page. ART was not dormant during this time: within CGG, we continued to use it for research work, and kept it maintained. But like so many others, we were simply floored with the chaos surrounding COVID, as well as other issues.

ART is maintained by the Computer Graphics Group of Charles University in Prague. In addition to the chaos brought by the pandemic during the past two years, our group suffered additional tragedy: in late 2019, so right before the pandemic started, Jaroslav Křivánek, one of the three faculty members in our group, died in an accident. The remainder of the group somehow had to cope with this loss, taking over supervision of all his Ph.D. students, projects and courses. We eventually managed: but given the limited resources we have, we spent the past two years in damage control mode. Outward facing maintenance of our Open Source projects was low on our list of priorities during this time.

Internally, we continued to work on ART during all this time, and used it for part of our research work. Notable publications which were achieved during this time were:

Also, a master thesis about integrating Embree into ART was successfully completed and defended in this timeframe.

Material from the first two publications is already in ART 2.1.1, the current release. The other two functionalities will be released as well at some later point: there is outstanding research work on both which is currently being carried out. The same goes for the Embree integration: this is highly complex work, and will be released once it is completely stable.

In the future, we will announce releases of ART here as well: but the main communication will be via the gitlab repository where the project now lives.