Scientists are finding three-dimensional perspective rendering to be an increasingly useful capability. This technique gives flat, two-dimensional data a realistic appearance. A typical example involves co-registration of a satellite image with terrain elevation data to produce a view of a planet's landscape. As three-dimensional rendering becomes more widely used for data visualization, and the volume of data increases, computation time becomes a key issue. As our data acquisition capabilities grow, our ability to process, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data becomes increasingly challenged.
Current capabilities can deal with only a fraction of the available scientific data.
Our goal is to build an interactive scientific visualization system using massively parallel machines and a high-speed communication network. This system will permit navigation of very large scientific datasets by navigating the dataset via a workstation-based user interface. Rays are projected from the observer's camera location through the pixels of the output image. The color assigned to the pixel is that of the background or the first pixel in the input space that the ray intersects. This approach can be parallelized by decomposing the image space rather than the input data space.