Procedural volume modeling, rendering, and visualization

Volume visualization techniques have advanced dramatically over the past fifteen years. However, the increase in scale of visualization tasks has been increasing at even a faster rate. Today, many problems require the visualization of gigabytes to terabytes of data. Additionally, the number of variables and dimensionality of many scientific simulations and observations has increased, while the resolution of computer graphics displays has not changed substantially (still a few million pixels). These factors present a significant challenge to current visualization techniques and approaches. We propose a new approach to visualization to solve these problems and provide flexibility and extensibility for visualization challenges over the next decade: procedural visualization. In this approach, we encode and abstract datasets to a more manageable level, while also developing more effective visualization and rendering techniques.