BioRay: Real-Time Ray Tracing and Volume Rendering in Bioinformatics

About

In this project we research the applications of real-time ray tracing and volume rendering in the bioinformatics domain. We are working on the visualization of proteins (cartoon models, surfaces), their properties (electrostatic potential) and related organisms (viral cryo-EM maps). Besides visualization itself, we also aim at applying ray tracing to non-visualization tasks where ray tracing serves as a general sampling algorithm.

Our primary platform is the molecular viewer and modeling tool BALLView coupled with real-time ray tracing library RTfact. On one side we use a set of advanced techniques on the CPU, like packet and frustum tracing, building from hierarchies, vectorization, and generic programming to achieve interactivity even on large (multi-million) and dynamic polygonal scenes. On the other hand, we employ advanced GPU-based volume ray tracer to deal with non-polygonal volumetric and procedural datasets in real-time.