Voreen: A Rapid-Prototyping Environment for Ray-Casting-Based Volume Visualizations

By splitting a complex ray-casting process into different tasks performed on different processors, Voreen provides a lot of flexibility because users can intervene at different points during ray casting. Voreen´s object-oriented design lets users easily create customized processor classes that cooperate seamlessly with existing classes. A user-friendly GUI supports rapid prototyping of visualization ideas. We´ve implemented several applications based on our library. In the future, we´d like to further extend Voreen´s capabilities to make visualization prototyping even easier on all abstraction levels. Thus, we plan to realize a set of dedicated processor skeletons, which are solely configured through shader programs and can thus be modified at runtime.