Nicer-Slicer-Dicer: An Interactive Volume Visualization Tool

Nicer-Slicer-Dicer (NSD) is a new, interactive tool for volume visualization. In addition to single scalar volumes, NSD can visualize multivariate and time series data. NSD achieves high rendering rates by compositing slice planes back-to-front while blending pixels through the use of alpha bu ering hardware. This technique introduces some small artifacts, but it works remarkably well with large data sets where voxels represent small areas in image space. The plane compositing technique also allows one to generate an isosurface and volume rendering simultaneously by interleaving planes and isosurface polygons. NSD also features a simple but very general animation mechanism based on key frames. A key frame speci es the values for parameters that e ect the presentation of the data such as view position, cutting plane positions and isosurface threshold. The animation mechanism is completely integrated within NSD, so specifying key frames is done in the same manner as that used to interactively explore the data. Given two or more key frames and the number of images to generate between each frame, NSD can interpolate to generate the intervening images and then play those images back as a movie loop.