SILICON GRAPHICS EXTENDS REACH WITH GROUNDBREAKING API.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE:SGI), Orlando, Fla., has introduced OpenGL Volumizer, the industry's first commercially available high-level immediate mode volume rendering application programming interface (API) for the energy, sciences and medical markets. OpenGL Volumizer is a revolutionary graphics API that ushers in groundbreaking capabilities for traditional volume visualization applications and allows, for the first time, standard graphics applications to treat volumetric and surface data in a similar fashion. With this new API, more sophisticated applications will be created, providing researchers with unparalleled visualization and exploration capabilities, significantly reducing time to insight and discovery.

Created primarily to support and extend Silicon Graphics' presence in the medical, scientific and oil and gas visualization markets, OpenGL Volumizer harnesses Silicon Graphics O2[EU1], OCTANE, Onyx2 and upcoming Windows NT graphics workstations to provide a powerful combination of features and capabilities previously unavailable to the industry. OpenGL Volumizer provides unprecedented features such as the ability to roam through extremely large data sets of up to 100 gigabytes, as well as leveraging the available texture-mapping hardware which boosts application performance upwards of 10 to 100 times faster than the historical CPU-bound solutions.

OpenGL Volumizer also introduces volumetric primitives - the breakthrough concept which enables the mixing of volume objects with geometric objects in the same scene, the deformation of the shape of a volume and the specification of arbitrarily shaped regions of interest. Because volumetric data can now coexist in the same scene as surface geometry, operations such as shading and picking can now be applied to volumes.

"Throughout history, volumetric data has always been treated as a second-class citizen to polygonal and geometric data," said Shawn Hopwood, product line manager, graphics APIs at Silicon Graphics. "Today with OpenGL Volumizer, Silicon Graphics breaks down the barriers that have existed between these two data types. This not only dramatically impacts traditional volume rendering, but even more significantly, introduces an entirely new paradigm into the world of OpenGL based surface-modeling applications."

OpenGL Volumizer is a high-level immediate mode tool kit which applications can directly access, or can leverage through their own internal scene graph or scene graph APIs such as Silicon Graphics OpenInventor, OpenGL Optimizer , IRIS Performer, and the future "Fahrenheit" project scene graph. As a high-level API, OpenGL Volumizer significantly reduces application development time and recurring engineering costs by greatly reducing the number of lines of code required to write volume rendering applications - from thousands to hundreds.

"OpenGL Volumizer is the foundation for the volume rendering capabilities in our 3D image navigation system, which we have been developing at our laboratory since January of 1998," said Dr. Ramin Shahidi, assistant professor of Neurosurgery and the director of Image Guidance Laboratories at Stanford University School of Medicine. "Developing a fast volume rendering engine can be an extremely difficult, time-consuming and cost-prohibitive process. This API will bring these capabilities within reach of the larger scientific and research communities. We are extremely pleased with the way this API is handling the demanding task of rendering huge medical data sets in real time on an Onyx2 InfiniteReality supercomputer."

"Silicon Graphics' OpenGL Volumizer's ability to leverage graphics hardware is clearly an advantage," said Allen McPherson, visualization research scientist with the The Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Now interfaces which let a user explore large amounts of data interactively can be developed writing comparatively small amounts of code - allowing for much quicker problem solving and discovery."

OpenGL Volumizer Industry Impact

OpenGL Volumizer will substantially increase the capabilities of applications used in the oil and gas, scientific and medical visualization markets. OpenGL Volumizer enables geophysicists and geologists to interactively roam through seismic data sets that can exceed 100 gigabytes of data on an Onyx2 visualization supercomputer, and are over 1,000 times larger than the previous limit of approximately 64 megabytes. This ability to explore such immense amounts of data at one time and in real time provides incredible time savings and allows for greater accuracy in locating precious, hard-to-find petroleum reservoirs.

"OpenGL Volumizer will continue to improve our ability to analyze very large data sets," said Michael Zeitlin, portfolio manager and Texaco fellow with Global Visualization Technolgy, Texaco Inc. "We intend to use the combination of OpenGL Volumizer and Onyx2 in our 3D Visualization Center. This combination will help us more quickly identify key geological features, which will give us an edge in our oil and gas exploration efforts."

For the medical industry the impact is just as dramatic. In hip replacement surgery, for example, the unique ability of OpenGL Volumizer to integrate volume and surface geometry within the same scene will enable medical applications to display a CT scan of a person's pelvis in the same scene with a CAD-generated polygonal model of a hip prosthesis. In surgical simulation and training, a geometric model of a scalpel can now appear in the same scene as a volumetric scan of a tumor, allowing surgeons to see not only their target, but the instrument they will be using.

In addition, there are great potential benefits from OpenGL Volumizer in non-traditional volume rendering markets such as visual simulation, CAD/CAM and digital content creation. In the area of visual simulation, for example, flight simulators might be created which would allow pilots to experience more realistic, volumetric patchy clouds and fog that could be flown through, instead of two-dimensional representations.

Availability and Supported Platforms

OpenGL Volumizer will be available on the IRIX operating system as of August 24, 1998 as a free development tool. The API will support Sun Solaris and Windows NT in late November 1998.

More information about Fahrenheit is available via http://www.sgi.com/fahrenheit/home.html