View-dependent exploration of massive volumetric models on large-scale light field displays

Abstract

[Abstract]: We report on a light-field display based virtual environment enabling multiple naked-eye users to perceive detailed multi-gigavoxel volumetric models as floating in space, responsive to their actions, and delivering different information in different areas of the workspace. Our contributions include a set of specialized interactive illustrative techniques able to provide different contextual information in different areas of the display, as well as an out-of-core CUDA-based raycasting engine with a number of improvements over current GPU volume raycasters. The possibilities of the system are demonstrated by the multi-user interactive exploration of 64 Gvoxel data sets on a 35 Mpixel light field display driven by a cluster of PCs.