What Is Emissive In Visualization?

The emissive display converts electrical energy into light energy. The plasma panels, thin film electro-luminescent displays are the examples.

The Emissive appearance emits light into the scene. The Emissive parameter applies if you assign a Color texture (the only type of texture supported by emissive appearances) and set the Blend Texture option under Texture on the Appearance tab.

The Emissive appearance emits light into the scene.

The Emissive parameter applies if you assign a Color texture (the only type of texture supported by emissive appearances) and set the Blend Texture option under Texture on the Appearance tab. If you do not set these texture options, the Emissive appearance reflects the light that is shining on it, but it does not radiate additional light into the scene, even if you set the Intensity parameter very high.

Parameters

Color In the absence of light, the appearance radiates the Emissive color. In typical scenes, the color of the Generic Appearance Type is the sum of the Base Color plus Emissive Color (plus Highlight Color for highlights).
Intensity Multiplies the Color value by adding luminance (causing more light to be emitted by the appearance). Due to clipping in monitors, adding intensity can make the Color appear washed out. To counterbalance this tendency, add saturation to the Color value after increasing Intensity.
Emitting Sides Controls which normal direction is used to emit light from. Front indicates the light is emit from the same side as the surface that the normal is facing. Both indicates light is emitted from both sides of the geometry normal.

The availability of commodity volumetric displays provides ordinary users with a new means of visualizing 3D data. Many of these displays are in the class of isotropically emissive light devices, which are designed to directly illuminate voxels in a 3D frame buffer, producing X-ray-like visualizations. While this technology can offer intuitive insight into a 3D object, the visualizations are perceptually different from what a computer graphics or visualization system would render on a 2D screen. This paper formalizes rendering on isotropically emissive displays and introduces a novel technique that emulates traditional rendering effects on isotropically emissive volumetric displays, delivering results that are much closer to what is traditionally rendered on regular 2D screens. Such a technique can significantly broaden the capability and usage of isotropically emissive volumetric displays. Our method takes a 3D dataset or object as the input, creates an intermediate light field, and outputs a special 3D volume dataset called a lumi-volume. This lumi-volume encodes approximated rendering effects in a form suitable for display with accumulative integrals along unobtrusive rays. When a lumi-volume is fed directly into an isotropically emissive volumetric display, it creates a 3D visualization with surface shading effects that are familiar to the users. The key to this technique is an algorithm for creating a 3D lumi-volume from a 4D light field. In this paper, we discuss a number of technical issues, including transparency effects due to the dimension reduction and sampling rates for light fields and lumi-volumes. We show the effectiveness and usability of this technique with a selection of experimental results captured from an isotropically emissive volumetric display, and we demonstrate its potential capability and scalability with computer-simulated high-resolution results.