Cube-3: A Real-Time Architecture for High-Resolution Volume Visualization.
Hanspeter Pfister, Arie E. Kaufman, Tzi‐cker Chiueh · 1995
This paper describes a high-performance special-purpose system, Cube-3, for displaying and manipulating highresolution volumetric datasets in real-time. A primary goal of Cube-3 is to render 512 3 , 16-bit per voxel, datasets at about 30 frames per second. Cube-3 implements a ray-casting algorithm in a highly-parallel and pipelined architecture, using a 3D skewed volume memory, a modular fast bus, 2D skewed buffers, 3D interpolation and shading units, and a ray projection cone. Cube-3 will allow users to interactively visualize and investigate in real-time static (3D) and dynamic (4D) high-resolution volumetric datasets. 1. Introduction A volumetric dataset is typically represented as a 3D regular grid of voxels (volume elements) representing some uniform or piecewise property of an object or phenomenon. This 3D dataset is commonly stored in a regular cubic frame buffer (CFB), which is a large 3D array of voxels (e.g., 128M voxels for a 512 3 dataset) and is displayed on a raster...