Volume Rendering in an Optical Tracking based Virtual Environment

In the last five-eight years the three dimensional displaying come into focus again. When it is amended by a tracking system it is called mixed reality. This paper presents a mixed reality environment (its hardware and software elements) developed by us on the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Our system uses a dual projector stereo display for three dimensional visualization and a computer-vision based tracking system. The hardware configuration consists of two projectors, polar filters, video cameras, cheap passive coloured markers and an average PC. Volumetric data visualization in a virtual environment has several benefits. It decreases the depth information loss caused by the 3D→ 2D projection, tracked tools can affect many properties of the visualization, that can be set or modify using the classic keyboard, mouse input in a difficult way. The final goal of this project is to improve this virtual environment with general tracking therefore it can be used for augmented reality applications.