GPGPU Enabled Ray Directed Adaptive Volume Visualization for High Density Scans

Abstract

This paper presents an open source implementation of a volume visualizer capable of rendering large scale simulated and tomographic volume datasets on everyday commodity hardware. The ability to visualize this data enables a wide range of analysis in many scientific disciplines, such as medicine, biology, engineering, and physics. The implementation presented takes advantage of a hierarchical space filling curve to efficiently query only a subset of the data required for accurate visualization. A major advantage of this implementation is that it is open source, and works on a wide range of visualization devices by using the Unity game engine, a cross platform engine capable of targeting over 25 platforms. This work’s unique contribution is utilizing a space filling curve for multiple bricks in the volume to permit adaptive streaming at different resolutions.

Publication
In the Proceedings of the Practice and Experience on Advanced Research Computing