Web based Out-of-Core Volume Visualization in Client-Server Architectures

High quality, interactive volume visualization is increasingly important as advancements in volumetric capture devices, increased GPU power, and greater interest from the biological/medical community are all currently happening. Researchers and clinicians want to access their data anywhere using a wide range of devices, from smart phones up to powerful multicore machines. Web based visualization applications are increasingly popular now that browsers are supported on nearly all computing platforms, and the new HTML5 standards enable graphical interaction without the need for proprietary plugins or additional APIs. In this paper, we present a novel, browserbased, out-of-core volume rendering tool that enables interactive rendering of large volume data on portable devices. The tool uses a client-server approach, where the rendering task is carried out on a server, and the interaction and viewing occurs through a client-system web browser.