Fast stereoscopic images with ray-traced volume rendering
Stephen J. Adelson, Charles D. Hansen · 1994
One of the drawbacks of standard volume rendering techniques is that it is often difficult to comprehend the three-dimensional structure of the volume from a single frame; this is especially true in cases where there is no solid surface.Generally, several frames must be generated and viewed sequentially, using motion parallax to relay depth.Another option is to generate a single stereoscopic pair, resulting in clear and unambiguous depth information in both static and moving images.Methods have been developed which take advantage of the coherence between the two halves of a stereo pair for polygon rendering and ray-tracing, generating the second half of the pair in significantly less time than that required to completely render a single image.This paper reports the results of implementing these techniques with parallel ray-traced volume rendering.In tests with different data types, the time savings is in the range of 70 -80%.