Biomedical Engineering Reference
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count of the projected screens. It is even possible to achieve higher resolution by
tiling projectors per wall.
14.6.2 Varrier
The Varrier [30, 31] is an auto-stereoscopic scalable virtual reality display that
allows users to view stereo images without the need to wear any glasses. Unlike
most stereo systems, which are based on projected displays that use active or
passive stereo techniques, it uses the barrier stereography technique [30, 31] to
generate images for the left and right eye. It can use LCD displays and so it is
possible to build a high-resolution tile-display version of this auto-stereoscopic
device. In the barrier method, a virtual barrier screen is created and placed in the
virtual world in front of the projection plane. An off-axis perspective projection of
this barrier screen, combined with the rest of the virtual world, is projected from
at least two viewpoints corresponding to the eye positions of the head-tracked
viewer. Figure 14.11 illustrates this principle.
The user does not have to deal with glasses but the system still uses a sensor
based head-tracking system which lets the system know where the user's eyes are in
3D space. The projections for the eyes are then drawn behind the barrier linescreen
accordingly. Like for the CAVE, the users also have a tracked joystick that allows
users to pick and poke at 3D data. Work is well underway to develop a fast neural
networks and camera-based head-tracking system that will help do away with the
sensor headband. Future systems will also employ high-resolution cameras to do
real-time hand gesture recognition to replace the joystick. The ultimate goal is to
have a completely encumbrance free VR system.
14.7 Future of Large Data Visualization
The popular belief of using high-performance computing to group several CPUs
together to achieve the power of future machines plays a key role in solving the
large data-exploration problems of today. Multicore, multi-CPU parallel architec-
tures seem to have an answer for handling large data visualization and we will
see more of these machines appearing at research organizations across the globe.
One recent exciting development has been the advent of programmable GPUs.
These inexpensive processors currently host up to 128 cores and have dedicated
fast memory and bus bandwidth. Driven by the video game industry, these graph-
ics cards are available as commodity hardware and can be clubbed together for
scalability. It is possible to envision a cluster farm of GPUs running scientific visu-
alization codes for interactive data exploration. Due to the inexpensive hardware,
they will also enable smaller research organizations to build their own graphics
supercomputer without having to depend on expensive shared resources such as
those hosted by supercomputing centers.
14.8 Conclusion
The problems generated by mesoscale in microscopy have challenged high-
performance computing by bringing together large multimodal, multiscale data
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