ParaView Glance 3.0 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of ParaView Glance 3.0 (github | release), which is included in the release of ParaView for Supercomputing 2018.

ParaView Glance brings together the latest web technologies for interactive scientific data visualization in your browser. It can be launched from web pages or from your desktop to quickly view volume-rendered images, geometries, molecules, point clouds, and much more.

This release of ParaView Glance contains the following enhancements that coincide with recent developments in VTK.js and ITK.js:

• Virtual Reality – Views can be exported to VR on the HTC Vive.
• DICOM – DICOM objects can be presented as a single 3D volume or as a collection of 2D slices. DICOM collections can be delivered as a single zip archive or selected using a multi-file chooser, and they will be reconstructed into a 3D volume.
• OBJ scenes – Objects can be loaded with custom material and texture properties by bundling obj/mtl/texture files into a zip file with the *.obz extension.
• Widgets – A new widget architecture in VTK.js stores the data for a widget separately from its representation and manipulation logic. In this manner, a widget can be shared among multiple VTK.js render windows and assigned a unique appearance and behavior in each.
• Colormaps – Improved colormap handling in VTK.js.
• VTK.js was upgraded to version 8.1.
• ITK.js was upgraded to version 9.1.1.

Features that will soon be added to ParaView Glance (via VTK.js and ITK.js) include the following:

• Paint Widget – The VTK.js paint widget is a re-architecting of the VTK paint widget that preserves much of same functionality: 2D and 3D painting; multi-stroke undo/redo; and the use of an underlying image to control how the paint is applied, e.g., limiting paint to points in the image that are above a given threshold.
• Interactive Multi-Planar Reconstruction – As shown in the video, VTK.js is being extended with a fast (GPU-based) method for displaying an arbitrarily oriented (and arbitrarily thick) slice through a 3D volume and its associated labelmaps. Also, we are providing a new interactor for intuitively controlling this visualization. This code and video were contributed by Steve Pieper, Isomics, Inc. Thanks Steve!

Additionally, VTK.js is in the process of being integrated with the OHIF Viewer to provide 3D visualization capabilities, e.g., see the demo on youtube.  This combined system will be shown at multiple venues at RSNA.

The release notes for ParaView Glance are available at https://github.com/Kitware/paraview-glance/releases.

The commit logs for VTK.js and ITK.js are available at the following links:

• https://github.com/Kitware/vtk-js/releases
• https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/itk-js/commits/master

This work was funded, in part, by National Institute Of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and the National Institute Of Biomedical Imaging And Bioengineering (NIBIB) via NIH grant R01EB021396.