Visualization and Computer Graphics on Isotropically Emissive Volumetric Displays

The availability of commodity volumetric displays provides ordinary users with a new means of visualizing 3D data. Many of these displays are in the class of isotropically emissive light devices, which are designed to directly illumi-nate voxels in a 3D frame buffer, producing X-ray-like visu-alizations. While this technology can offer intuitive insight into a 3D object, the visualizations are perceptually different from what a computer graphics or visualization system would render on a 2D screen. This paper formalizes rendering on isotropically emissive displays and introduces a novel technique that emulates traditional rendering effects on isotropically emissive volumetric displays, delivering results that are much closer to what is traditionally rendered on regular 2D screens. Such a technique can significantly broaden the capa-bility and usage of isotropically emissive volumetric displays. Our method takes a 3D dataset or object as the input, creates an intermediate light field, and outputs a special 3D volume dataset called a lumi-volume. This lumi-volume encodes approximated rendering effects in a form suitable for display with accumulative integrals along unobtrusive rays. When a lumi-volume is fed directly into an isotropically emissive volumetric display, it creates a 3D visualization with [...]

1 Introduction

The ultimate display may be thought of as a device that can reproduce any given light field (LF) or plenoptic function [1], [19], [26]. However, in order for such a hypothetical 4D LF device to display images at an adequate resolution, it would need a tremendous amount of bandwidth and processing power—capabilities that may not be available for many years [33]. In the meantime, 3D displays, which have recently become more affordable, can provide users with a more immersive visualization experience when compared with traditional 2D displays. While not the final goal, these new 3D displays are an important step toward the ultimate display.