[vtkusers] VTK and PNaCl

[Sébastien Jodogne]

Dear all,

I am interested in developing a Web-based 3D viewer for medical imaging,
with the support of MIP volume rendering.

I have considered to use WebGL to this end. Unfortunately, the current
version WebGL does not features the native support of MIP rendering [1]. My
request to introduce an extension to support MIP in WebGL is now about 1
year old, and has not been taken into consideration by the Khronos group
yet (even though MIP is supported by OpenGL ES) [2].

I have therefore tried to do MIP rendering through some native API for Web
browsers, using VTK. To the best of my knowledge, it is unfortunately
impossible to access the 3D context of the window of the browser using
NPAPI [3]. This prevents the use of VTK inside Web browsers.

Recently however, Google has introduced its "Native Client API" nicknamed
PNaCl (Pepper + Native Client) into Chrome [4]. According to Google's
description, PNaCl allows the development of a C++ plugin that can access
the 3D context of the Chrome window [5]. This looks like a very promising
approach for scientific, cross-platform visualization in the cloud. Even if
IE and Firefox do not currently implement PNaCl, cross-browser support can
be envisioned thanks to the fact that PNaCl is open-sourced under a BSD
license.

My question is the following: Is it possible to create a native plugin for
Google Chrome (with PNaCl) that renders 3D scenes through VTK? This looks
like a great opportunity for the spreading of VTK.

Regards,
Sébastien-


[1]
https://www.khronos.org/webgl/public-mailing-list/archives/1212/msg00066.html
[2]
http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/extensions/proposals/EXT_blend_minmax/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client
[5] https://developers.google.com/native-client/devguide/coding/3D-graphics


-- 
Sébastien Jodogne
s.jodogne at gmail.com
http://www.sjodogne.be/
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