From: Joe Quinlan (jquinlan@sgi.com)
Date: 08/07/2000 13:59:03
Hello Volumizers,
Thank you to those who attended the OpenGL Volumizer Special Interest Group
meeting at SIGGRAPH 2000. For those of you who couldn't make it, I'll
summarize the meeting.
Volumizer is on active development status at SGI. Introduced at the meeting
were:
Harold Treat, Volumizer Engineering Manager
Dave Akers, Volumizer Core Engineer
Praveen Bhaniramka, Volumizer Core Engineer
Svend Tang-Petersen, Volumizer Applied Engineer
Joe Quinlan, Volumizer Product Manager
Simon Hayhurst, Product Line Manager
Volumizer 1.2 has been a solid success. It has been a groundbreaking
solution for the scientific visualization, medical, and oil & gas markets.
One major automotive company has written an interactive application using
Volumizer to visualize previously unseen types of turbulence occurring
behind a moving vehicle. This application is an example of Volumizer 1.2 in
emerging markets, in this case computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Another
emerging engineering analysis market is stochastic crash analysis. SGI's
Svend Tang-Petersen demonstrated an application using Volumizer that
analyzes the changing effects on various parts of an automobile caused by
slightly varying the angle of attack in a 90-degree head-on collision.
Medical services is also an example of an emerging Volumizer market.
Medical institutions are expressing interest in using Volumizer with OpenGL
Vizserver to provide real-time 3D surgical planning imagery to many more
medical practitioners, not just the radiologists located in a central
laboratory.
SGI now wants to take the next step in volume rendering. We want to make
Volumizer into something that will make it easier to build volume rendering
applications that leverage the capabilities of our scalable systems. At
SIGGRAPH, SGI debuted the very scalable SGI Onyx 3000 series. Enabling
Volumizer to take advantage of our scalable systems will allow volume
rendering to grow in two important new areas: Reality Centers and Visual
Serving.
Reality Centers have become an important tool for the oil & gas industry.
Oil wells cost several million dollars each to drill, and many of them end
up non-productive because the well was not drilled in the optimum location.
If just several of these non-productive wells can be eliminated through the
use of Volumizer in a collaborative Reality Center, then the customer
investment can pay for itself within one year.
Only SGI's Onyx class machines provide the fullest support for volume
rendering, including hardware support for 3D textures and texture look-up
tables. SGI's visual serving product, OpenGL Vizserver, is enabling this
unparalleled volume visualization capability to be delivered over standard
100BaseT networking to any desktop machine within an organization. You
don't have to be physically located at the Onyx.
SGI's design for Volumizer NextGen is incorporating feedback from both
current and potential users. We want to broaden the reach of volume
rendering by making Volumizer NextGen a new architecture consisting of an
API at a higher level of abstraction. This will make Volumizer NextGen
easier to integrate with existing applications, thus broadening the appeal
of volume rendering. Volumizer NextGen will focus on leveraging the
strength of SGI's scalable Onyx 3000 system. A strong user community
rallied around this new API will make it easier for SGI to innovate in the
area of volume rendering. Possible future enhancements to the initial
product offering of Volumizer NextGen include: volume lighting, a shading
language for volume rendering, multiple overlapping volumes, volume roaming,
and better support for visualization of CFD datasets.
There have been questions on info-volumizer about the availability of
Volumizer on other platforms. Currently our main engineering focus is on
Volumizer NextGen, which, for the reasons stated above, will be made
available for SGI's high-end IRIX systems. For customers who have a
specific need for Volumizer 1.2 on non-IRIX platforms, we are willing to
discuss providing this through a professional services arrangement.
We look forward to your continued input as we develop Volumizer NextGen.
Best Regards,
Joe Quinlan
OpenGL Volumizer Product Manager
============================================
Joe Quinlan, Product Manager
Advanced Systems Marketing, SGI
Tel: (650) 933-6670 Fax: (650) 932-6670
Pager: 800-745-5748
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