This October, Mitsubishi Electric announced VolumePro, a real-time
volume rendering system for PC-class computers. Based on the Cube-4
architecture developed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook,
this system fits on a PCI board and is capable of rendering a volume data
set of 16 mega-voxels (e.g., 256^3 datasets) at 30 frames per second.
In this talk, I will outline the volume rendering algorithm implemented in VolumePro, report on the chip implementation, and give an overview of our plans for commercial development of real-time volume graphics.
Short biography:
Hanspeter Pfister received his PhD in Computer Science from the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. In his doctorate research with Prof.
Arie Kaufman he developed Cube-4, a scalable architecture for real-time
volume rendering. He joined Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)
in 1996. His research interests include computer graphics, scientific visualization,
computer architecture, and VLSI design. He is currently chief architect
of the VolumePro project.
Dr. Pfister has published numerous papers on visualization, has run
courses at international conferences, and holds several relevant patents.
He maintains an extensive web page at: http://www.merl.com/people/pfister/