Interactive Ray Tracing for Visualization

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Visualization systems are most effective when the user can interactively explore the data by varying the viewpoint and visualization parameters via direct manipulation. However, visualization applications fre-quently deal with extremely large datasets, so such interaction is often impossible. In addition to being large, these datasets often have high depth-complexity and non-polygonal primitives, which makes them poorly suited to most current graphics accelerators. This project will investigate the use of ray tracing vi-sualization applications. By exploiting parallelism and image-based-rendering (pixel reprojection) this project can create a system that is both interactive and responsive for very large datasets. In addition, the programmable nature of such a system will allow improved rendering effects such as shadows and transparency, and sup-port for non-polygonal primitives such as glyphs and volumes. To test the relevance and performance of this system the project will be tested in several application areas: medical visualization, fluid flow visualization, terrain visualization, and bioelectric modeling visualization.