Design for a real-time high-quality volume rendering workstation

A design is presented for a workstation capable of rendering arbitrary mixtures of analytically defined geometry and sampled scalar fields of three spatial dimensions in realtime or near real-time. The design is based on volumetric compositing, a relatively new approach to visualizing scalar fields by computing 2D projections of a colored semi-transparent volume. Geometric primitives are added by filtering and 3D scan-converting them into the dataset prior to rendering. Speedups totaling four orders of magnitude over published volumetric compositing techniques are obtained through a combination of algorithmic improvements and hardware implementation on Pixelplanes 5, a massively parallel raster display engine incorporating custom logic-enhanced memory chips. A preliminary design is also presented for a two-handed volumeof-interest data exploration tool.