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Quo Vadis, VolVis?
Hanspeter Pfister, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
The discipline of volume visualization has come a long way. Real-time volume rendering on commodity hardware is now commonplace. Many theoretical aspects of volume modeling and volume visualization have been studied in detail. And the commercial impact of volume visualization is respectable, especially in medical and geophysical applications. Yet, many people share the feeling that the field is becoming stagnant, that too much research focuses on incremental algorithmic improvements, and that we have become disconnected from the scientists, engineers, and doctors who need volume visualization. The question is: where do we go from here?
In this talk I will first take stock of the achievements in volume rendering since 1992, when I attended my first VolVis symposium. I will focus on methods for hardware-accelerated rendering
of rectilinear volume datasets: ray casting, texture slicing, shear-warp rendering, and splatting. I will point out which problems could be overcome with progress in technology, and which problems have proven to be fundamentally harder to solve.
The second part of my talk will focus on the future challenges in volume visualization. I will argue that real-time volume rendering is - for all practical purposes - a solved issue. Instead, we need to focus on the principal goal of volume visualization: To convey information with graphical techniques. This simple statement raises many useful questions: How do we convey information effectively? How do we measure effectiveness? What are appropriate forms of visual abstraction? What forms of user interaction are most effective to gain insights? How can technological progress assist us in conveying information more effectively?
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