Image-Based Remote Real-Time Volume Rendering: Decoupling Rendering From View Point Updates

Remote rendering is employed when the visualization task is too challenging for the hardware used to display a dataset or when it is too time consuming to transfer the complete dataset. Volume visualization with its dataset sizes growing with the 3rd power of their spatial resolution is such a task. Since remote rendering introduces additional sources of latency, its applicability to virtual environments is limited because of the required low delays from user action to displayed image. We counter these latencies with image-based rendering techniques: color image data along with additional depth information is warped, while new data has not been completely received. Using these approximate images, it is possible to decouple the cheap display phase from rendering. While depth values are trivially deduced for polygons, we contribute heuristics for volumetric datasets with varying transparency.