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1. Introduction
The amount of medical and biological information available to educators
and students is increasing in both volume and complexity.
To help disseminate this rapidly growing body of knowledge, efficient
and innovative ways of portraying this information in a convenient, exciting,
and explanatory manner must be developed. While animations are
a highly effective means of displaying and emphasizing critical aspects
of a particular process, they may also consist of very large datasets.
In the past, the large volume of data may have restricted the level
of sophistication of the educational animation that could be transferred
to the end user. However, as desktop computers and graphics cards
become increasingly powerful, the medium of animation becomes
a viable option for educational purposes.
To accomplish these goals, we propose a method by which to create the animation,
make it interactive to promote the educational experience, and maximize accessibility.
This last goal can be accomplished through our volume compression scheme
which minimizes transmission time and allows for online reconstruction and rendering.
Furthermore, because users obtain better understanding of the scientific processes
when they are allowed some manipulation of the time scale, color-map,
and opacity parameters, we propose that the final animation be rendered client-side
to allow user interactivity and tailorability.
In this proposal, we aim to develop such a visualization
and animation pipeline for interactive and interrogative visualization
of large time-varying datasets. In the first stage of the proposed pipeline,
the animation will be created based on the apparent need for a particular process
and most current research. Using in-house and commercially available software,
we will design the animation on sound scientific and animation principles.
In the second stage, the volumetric video is decoded and played back
by an interactive visualization browser that is available on standard desktop
workstations equipped with a 3D graphics card. In contrast to a standard video player,
the visualization browser allows certain levels of interactivity
such as dynamically changing viewing parameters, modifying lighting conditions,
and adjusting color-opacity transfer functions, in addition to timed playback of
the volumetric video along some predefined fly-path in space and time.
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