The OpenGL Volumizer™ API is a library of C++ classes that facilitates the display and manipulation of volumetric data. Typical examples of volumetric data are clinical diagnostic images (such as CT, MRI, and PET), seismic data, and unstructured meshes common in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. The OpenGL Volumizer API facilitates rapid development of efficient, portable, and easily maintainable applications that have the ability to manipulate and visualize large volumetric data sets.

OpenGL Volumizer facilitates displaying and manipulating volumetric data by providing a level of abstraction that shelters the application programmer from the mundane task of dealing with platform-specific details. Prototyping and development cycles are therefore greatly shortened allowing the programmer to focus on the application rather than the mechanics of the volume rendering process. At the same time, it allows the implementers of the API to create highly optimized code that can be tailored to specific platforms and updated as new hardware and software are introduced. Applications can thus take full advantage of the underlying hardware while maintaining a single code base spanning multiple platforms.

With a highly flexible design that includes high-level utilities as well as low-level functionality, OpenGL Volumizer allows for easy modification of the default behavior, providing means for differentiation. Because of its design, the toolkit provides an unparalleled set of sought-after features such as:

• Mixing volumes and surfaces within the same scene
• Arbitrarily shaped regions of interest
• Interactive roaming and multi-resolution rendering of arbitrarily large volume data-sets
• High quality volume rendering using acceleration provided by the graphics hardware
• Rendering multiple co-registered volumes in a coherent fashion
• Parallel rendering of volumes using multiple graphics pipes
• Direct volume rendering of unstructured grids

The OpenGL Volumizer API is a high-level toolkit built on top of OpenGL®. Therefore, it can be used in the familiar framework of many existing OpenGL applications. At the same time, by adding suitable node "wrappers" for OpenGL Volumizer class objects and actions, it can be easily integrated into existing applications based on higher level, Scene graph APIs such as OpenGL Performer™, and toolkits such as the Visualization Toolkit (VTK).