Volumetric three-dimensional display system with rasterization hardware

An 8-color multiplanar volumetric display is being developed by Actuality Systems, Inc. It will be capable of utilizing an image volume greater than 90 million voxels, which we believe is the greatest utilizable voxel set of any volumetric display constructed to date. The display is designed to be used for molecular visualization, mechanical CAD, e-commerce, entertainment, and medical imaging. As such, it contains a new graphics processing architecture, novel high-performance line-drawing algorithms, and an API similar to a current standard. Three-dimensional imagery is created by projecting a series of 2-D bitmaps ("image slices") onto a diffuse screen that rotates at 600 rpm. Persistence of vision fuses the slices into a volume-filling 3-D image. A modified three-panel Texas Instruments projector provides slices at approximately 4 kHz, resulting in 8-color 3-D imagery comprised of roughly 200 radially-disposed slices which are updated at 20 Hz. Each slice has a resolution of 768 by 768 pixels, subtending 10 inches. Am unusual off-axis projection scheme incorporating tilted rotating optics is used to maintain good focus across the projection screen. The display electronics includes a custom rasterization architecture which converts the user's 3-D geometry data into image slices, as well as 6 Gbits of DDR SDRAM graphics memory.