This article is the foreword of a serie of article about ray tracing. It's probably a word that you may have heard without really knowing what it represents or without an idea of how to implement one using a programming language. This article and the following will try to fill that for you. Note that this introduction is covering generalities about ray tracing and will not enter into much details of our implementation. If you're interested about actual implementation, formulas and code please skip this and go to part one after this introduction.