Single-Pass Composable 3D Lens Rendering and Spatiotemporal 3D Lenses

Abstract

We present a new 3D lens rendering technique and a new spatiotemporal lens. Interactive 3D lenses, often called volumetric lenses, provide users with alternative views of data sets within 3D lens boundaries while maintaining the surrounding overview (context). In contrast to previous multipass rendering work, we discuss the strengths, limitations, and performance costs of a single-pass technique especially suited to fragment-level lens effects, such as color mapping, lighting, and clipping. Some object-level effects, such as a data set selection lens, are also incorporated, with each object's geometry being processed once by the graphics pipeline. For a substantial range of effects, our approach supports several composable lenses at interactive frame rates without performance loss during increasing lens intersections or manipulation by a user. Other cases, for which this performance cannot be achieved, are also discussed. We illustrate possible applications of our lens system, including Time Warp lenses for exploring time-varying data sets.

Interactive focus + context medical data exploration and editing

“…In a recent work, Borst et al . proposed a single‐pass rendering technique that works with volumetric lenses for polygonal datasets. However, their technique requires multiple comparisons in the fragment shader to perform volume in/out tests.…”

“…Previous research efforts either used separate passes to do this (Borst et al . provides an overview ) or checked each sample during the volume rendering process . Especially for volume ray casting using GPU architectures, this approach presents problems because it requires the shader to perform different actions for each sample based on the result of the in–out checks.…”