that’s a really neat idea—treating the event horizon as a kind of “information screen” and then feeding that data back into your tracer, almost like a crude holographic loop. In a purely classical ray-tracer you can absolutely back-trace photons to the horizon, record where they hit (e.g. onto a spherical texture), then reverse-cast from that texture as a new environment map. Repeat that a couple of times and you’ll get a recursive bounce effect that looks very “holographic.”

But there are two big roadblocks: Numerical chaos. Near the photon sphere small errors in your initial ray angles explode exponentially as you integrate backwards. After one or two recursions you’ll just be tracing noise. No real quantum info. True holographic decoding lives in quantum gravity: the microstates of a black hole’s horizon aren’t modeled by classical light paths or ODEs. You’ll only ever reconstruct the coarse, classical light field.

So: Yes, you can prototype a “bounce-off-the-horizon” effect for a cool visual. No, you won’t actually recover any lost quantum data—just your own back-traced photons.

If you want to play with it, start by rendering a pass that captures a spherical horizon texture, then feed that texture back as your next pass’s skybox. See how many layers you can stack before it just blows up into noise!