The voxblt Engine: A Voxel Frame Buffer Processor

Abstract

The voxblt Engine (vE) is a 3D frame-buffer processor which manipulates and processes "3D bitmaps" (voxel maps) stored in a cubic frame buffer of voxels. The vE is the 3D counterpart of the 2D frame buffer processor, which is an extended version of the 2D bitblt and RasterOps engines. The primitives of the vE are subcubes of the cubic frame buffer and are of three kinds: rooms (3D windows), jacks (3D cursors), and figurines (3D icons). In addition to manipolating these primitives, the vE also serves as a monitor for interaction, as an interface for 3D input devices, and as a channel for inputting into the cubic frame buffer 3D voxel images from either 3D scanners or a voxel image database. The vE has been developed as part of the CUBE system, In which it operates as an Independent processor executing its own commands stored in a 3D framebuffer display list. A room manager, which is the 3D counterpart of the 2D Window manager, has been implemented on top of the vE.