Real-time volume rendering

With the advent of high-powered, commodity volume visualization hardware comes a new challenge: effectively harnessing the visualization power to enable greater understanding of data through dynamic interaction. We examine Cube-4/VolumePro as the latest advance in real-time volume visualization hardware. We describe tools to utilize this hardware including a software developers' kit, called the Cube Toolkit (CTK). We show how the CTK supports algorithms such as perspective rendering, overlapping volumes, and geometry mixing within volumes. We examine a case study of a virtual colonoscopy application developed using the CTK.