Facilitating real-time volume interaction.
We report on efforts to provide high-level intuitive tools that exploit commodity-based computing to facilitate real-time and distributed interactions with volumetric data. These efforts include an open source volume-rendering library, a portable volume visualization application framework, and parallel volume-rendering exploiting commodity-based hardware. We present our design and implementations, as well as examples of some of the various groups currently utilizing these tools, and discuss the tradeoffs of our developments versus existing techniques.