The goal of the project is to generate a scene by modeling light transport with the ray tracing technique. This technique is an improvement over rasterization image fidelity quality at the cost of system resources.
"This technique was first deployed in applications where taking relatively long time to render could be tolerated" - Wikipedia
As hardware became more and more powerful and efficient with the creation of specialized hardware for the fundamental operations of linear algebra, ray tracing became a standard of high quality and realistic scenes in computer graphics. Most of the triple A games in the industry utilize this technique to render digital objects.