The Computer Graphics Scene in the United States

We briefly survey the major thrusts of computer graphics activities, examining trends and topics rather than offering a comprehensive survey of all that is happening. The directions of professional activities, hardware, software, and algorithms are outlined. Within hardware we examine workstations, personal graphics systems, high performance systems, and low level VLSI chips; within software, standards and interactive system design; within algorithms, visible surface rendering and shading, three-dimensional modeling techniques, and animation. Note: This paper was presented at Eurographics\u2784 in Copenhagen, Denmark

Layered volume splatting

We present a new layered, hardware-accelerated splatting algorithm for volume rendering. Layered volume splatting features the speed benefits of fast axis-aligned pre-classified sheet-buffer splatting while at the same time exhibiting display quality comparable to high-quality post-classified view-aligned sheet-buffer splatting. Additionally, we enhance the quality by using a more accurate approximation of the volume rendering integral. Commonly, the extinction coefficient of the volume rendering integral is approximated by the first two elements of its Taylor series expansion to allow for simple α-blending. In our approach we use the original, exponential extinction coefficient to achieve a better approximation. In this paper we describe the layered splatting algorithm and how it can be implemented on the GPU. We compare the results in terms of performance and quality to prior state-of-the-art volume splatting methods

Biomedical Data Exploration Meets Telecollaboration

In many biomedical applications, several researchers need to collaborate on extracting or validating models from empirical and simulation data. Often these collaborators do not reside at the same location, making collaboration and consultation difficult and costly. We present a system, TDE, which integrates sophisticated data exploration and telecoltaboration capabilities. It runs in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment, supporting a wide variety of displays around a centralized compute server. It offers the users customizable views of the data. Pointing and cursor linking are based in n-dimensional object space, rather than screen space. We demonstrate TDE's teleeollaborative data exploration facilities in three biomedical applications: user-asslsted, boundary-based segmentation of an embryo heart, multi-spectral segmentation of thyroid tissue, and volume probing of a CT scan