Design decisions for a volume renderer user interface some whys and hows.pdfVIP

Design decisions for a volume renderer user interface some whys and hows Jane Wilhelms Allen Van Gelder Tom Go o dman Ronald MacCracken Orion Wilson Andy John Computer and Information Sciences University of California Santa Cruz CA Abstract In designing a graphical user interface GUI for our curvilinear volume renderer qp quick pro jection we made design decisions based up on exp erience in implementing several other visualization programs As we gradually rened our vision of an appropriate interface our programs have b ecome more mo dular as well as easier to use and often parts of the interface can b e directly p orted for use with other software We present an overview of the interface with an explanation of design decisions While we dont claim this is in any sense the ultimate user interface we hop e this may help others avoid timeconsuming exp erimentation in interface design Intro duction This pap er describ es the interface for a pro jectiontyp e direct volume renderer qp for quick pro jection Direct volume rendering is a metho d for visualizing threedimensional scalar data by mapping data values to color and opacity The qp volume renderer is designed for interactive exploration of threedimensional data volumes sp ecied on curvilinear structured and rectilinear grids A variety of rendering metho ds have b een implemented Qp was designed sp ecically to deal with the problems of rendering structured grids in reasonable time It also works with rectilinear grids but is slower than metho ds that are designed sp ecically for such grids The algorithms for volume rendering used in qp are describ ed elsewhere VGW this rep ort discusses the issues involved in designing the user interface for the software Where appropriate we also mention interface issues and options e