VTK/ARB Notes/March 2014

3/5/2014

Will started with introductions.

Membership: Claudio left. Ken Moreland replaced Brian Wylie.

Discussion on the mission of the board: Long term vision. Guidance on big changes.

Will provided an overview of the NIH VTK Maintenance grant. Overhaul of rendering (geometry and volume rendering) and maintenance.

Discussion on future directions:

Bill: VTK 20 years old. Applications are moving to lighter weight platforms. Mobile etc.

Steve: A lot of stuff in VTK that you can’t afford on lightweight platforms. Could use Javascript bindings.

Paolo: Lots of information from sensors. Big data.

Andrew: Threading could be a focus. Pull in boost.

Steve: Aware of image orientation, propagate through pipeline. Natively handled in VTK.

Bill: Thought NIH grant could handle orientation etc.

Bill: Maybe we are a niche market. Always fit in big data.

Bill, Steve: Geovis, social 3D visualization

Bill: Focused in 3D

Question: Does C++ library fit into these new areas (Web).

Steve: Doing rendering in OpenCL. He would always choose OpenCL for threaded application development.

Steve: VTK should take rendering seriously. Good lighting, effects etc.

Steve, Berk: Discussion on client-server separation. VTK’s role on server side.

Stephane: Distinguish between data that fits in memory on the client vs. server side. API for small datasets on the client side.

Bill: Software process big sphere of influent for us. We have good data model and solid code base. Well tested architecture. Apply architecture to new domains.

Ken: Bloated nature of things in VTK. Huge stack trace when debugging pipeline execution. For HPC and mobile trimmed down rendering. People balking at sheer size of VTK. Smaller libraries to fit into HPC and mobile

Steve: xdummy. Avoid dependence on X server.

Modularization at a filter level

Will: Future discussions on roadmap, VTK rendering. Berk et al. will lead a discussion on scene graph in VTK.