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Interactive visualization of volumetric data with WebGL in real-time

Published: 20 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

This article presents and discusses the implementation of a direct volume rendering system for the Web, which articulates a large portion of the rendering task in the client machine. By placing the rendering emphasis in the local client, our system takes advantage of its power, while at the same time eliminates processing from unreliable bottlenecks (e.g. network). The system developed articulates in efficient manner the capabilities of the recently released WebGL standard, which makes available the accelerated graphic pipeline (formerly unusable). The dependency on specially customized hardware is eliminated, and yet efficient rendering rates are achieved. The Web increasingly competes against desktop applications in many scenarios, but the graphical demands of some of the applications (e.g. interactive scientific visualization by volume rendering), have impeded their successful settlement in Web scenarios. Performance, scalability, accuracy, security are some of the many challenges that must be solved before visual Web applications popularize. In this publication we discuss both performance and scalability of the volume rendering by WebGL ray-casting in two different but challenging application domains: medical imaging and radar meteorology.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    Web3D '11: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on 3D Web Technology
    June 2011
    175 pages
    ISBN:9781450307741
    DOI:10.1145/2010425
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 20 June 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. WebGL
    2. direct volume rendering
    3. medical imaging
    4. ray casting
    5. real-time visualization
    6. weather radar volume

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    • (2024)Residency Octree: A Hybrid Approach for Scalable Web-Based Multi-Volume RenderingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.332719330:1(1380-1390)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
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    • (2022)Real-Time Renderings of Multidimensional Massive DataCubes on Jupyter NotebookICGG 2022 - Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Geometry and Graphics10.1007/978-3-031-13588-0_59(685-696)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2022
    • (2021)Performance of WebGL standard for displaying 3D applications on mobile devices2021 16th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI)10.23919/CISTI52073.2021.9476391(1-6)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2021
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    • (2020)Medical 3D Graphics With eXtensible 3DRecent Advances in 3D Imaging, Modeling, and Reconstruction10.4018/978-1-5225-5294-9.ch012(270-288)Online publication date: 2020
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    • (2020)Modern Scientific Visualizations on the WebInformatics10.3390/informatics70400377:4(37)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2020
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