Interactive stereoscopic rendering of volumetric environments

We present an efficient stereoscopic rendering algorithm supporting interactive navigation through large-scale 3D voxel-based environments. In this algorithm, most of the pixel values of the right image are derived from the left image by a fast 3D warping based on a specific stereoscopic projection geometry. An accelerated volumetric ray casting then fills the remaining gaps in the warped right image. Our algorithm has been parallelized on a multiprocessor by employing effective task partitioning schemes and achieved a high cache coherency and load balancing. We also extend our stereoscopic rendering to include view-dependent shading and transparency effects. We have applied our algorithm in two virtual navigation systems, flythrough over terrain and virtual colonoscopy, and reached interactive stereoscopic rendering rates of more than 10 frames per second on a 16-processor SGI challenge.