Interactive Ray Tracing for Visualization

当用户可以通过直接操作改变视点和可视化参数来交互式地探索数据时，可视化系统是最有效的。然而，可视化应用程序经常处理非常大的数据集，因此这种交互通常是不可能的。除了庞大之外，这些数据集通常具有高深度复杂性和非多边形原语，这使得它们不适合大多数当前的图形加速器。这个项目将调查光线追踪可视化应用程序的使用。通过利用并行性和基于图像的渲染（像素重投影），该项目可以创建一个对非常大的数据集既具有交互性又具有响应性的系统。此外，这种系统的可编程特性将允许改进渲染效果，如阴影和透明度，并支持非多边形原语，如字形和体积。为了测试该系统的相关性和性能，该项目将在几个应用领域进行测试：医学可视化、流体流动可视化、地形可视化和生物电建模可视化。

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.