The web is increasingly competing against desktop applications in many scenarios, yet the graphical demands of some, such as interactive scientific visualisation by volume rendering, have been a burden for their successful transition. Performance, scalability, accuracy, security are some of the main challenges that must be solved to see applications emerge. We demonstrate both performance and scalability of volume rendering by ray-casting based on WebGL in both medical imaging and radar meteorology.
Volume Rendering: An opportunity for next generation visualisation of great amount experimental data. Volume rendering gives the opportunity of visualising data in 3D. Implementation of 3D volume rendering involves volume data management, which relates to operations including acquisition, resampling, and editing of the data set; rendering parameters including window width and level, opacity, brightness, and percentage classification; and image display, which comprises techniques such as “fly-through” and “fly-around,” multiple-view display, obscured structure and shading depth cues, and kinetic and stereo depth cues.
Visual Computing: Analysis of complex patterns of visual information from experimental data. Computer vision provides tools to automatically analyse data, extract the most significant components for storage, visualisation or interpretation. It also includes model fitting techniques to determine the complexity of signals, degrees of predictability of data, robust parameter estimation and additional layers for semantic analysis.
