Real-time volume rendering of time-varying data using a fragment-shader compression approach

The recent advance of graphics hardware allowed real-time volume rendering of structured grids using a 3D texturing approach. The next challenging problem is to extend the algorithms to time-varying volumetric data (4D functions), which consume more storage and are not directly supported in current graphics hardware. Here we present a new visualization technique that includes (1) a compression scheme of sparse 4D functions into 3D textures, and (2) a visualization algorithm that decompress the stored data from the 3D textures using the programmability of fragment shaders, allowing real-time visualization of such data. We illustrate the system in action with datasets resulting from computational fluid dynamics simulations.