Thanks for posting, this is very interesting. I wish they included more details. The realm of realtime computer graphics has been totally dominated by the SGI+Renderman line of thinking, and realtime raytracing has only made occassional appearances in demos or academic research (and possibly the pipe dreams of Intel executives wishing for a disruptive technology to make up for their weakness in graphics). It's fascin…
Automotive applications are different in that they're inordinately concerned with the appearance of reflections, especially in areas such as the appearance of the headlights. This makes non-raytraced approaches substantially less valuable in the design process. They really want to know what the shiny bits will look like ahead of time. Raytracing still suffers form the performance implications of incoherent memory acc…
Also, a slight adaptation could be good for radiation and electromagnetic research (e.g. how well a material blocks beta radiation, etc.)