Lasers have several applications in the industry, such as cutting, engraving, and drilling. A specific use of lasers is taking distance measurements, by shining beams of light at objects and observing the hit points with an infrared camera. However, the depth measurements are inevitably inaccurate. This is mainly due to the manufacturing and design errors in beam splitters and dynamic speckle. The goal of this thesis is not to reduce the contribution of these effects, but to introduce them into a computer simulation, to make the virtual model as close as possible to reality. Studying the works of J. W. Goodman, Donald D. Duncan, and others in the field of Fourier Optics gave a solid theoretical foundation of the beam splitter and dynamic speckle. To tailor the general theory to this specific case, various physical experiments were carried out. Based on the theory and the experiment results, a way to extend an already existing physically based rendering engine was proposed. In conclusion, this extension produces similar results in the simulation to what is observable in real life. This is achieved with a small computational overhead on a modern graphics processor. Due to these properties, the technique can be used for more robust testing of depth estimation and reconstruction algorithms. Moreover, it also raises the quality of machine learning data that can be collected in large volumes from a computer simulation of this setup, leading to better downstream performance
