VTK

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VTK

Developed by	Kitware Inc..
Latest release	5.0.4
OS	Cross-platform
Available in	C++, Tcl, Python, Java
Genre	Scientific visualization
License	3-Clause BSD
Website	www.vtk.org

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open source graphics toolkit. It is a platform independent graphics engine with parallel rendering support. VTK has an active development community that includes laboratories, institutions and universities from around the world. VTK has several large collaborations between Kitware and national organizations such as Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos, and Livermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for their large data visualization research efforts.

VTK is an open-source toolkit licensed under the BSD license.

1 History
2 References
- 2.1 Books
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

VTK was initially created in 1993 as companion software to the book "The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" published by Prentice-Hall. The book and software were written by three researchers from GE Corporate R&D (Will Schroeder, Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen) on their own time and with permission from GE (thus the ownership of the software resided with, and continues to reside with, the authors). Once the book was published and the software released with a BSD-style open source license, a world-wide community of users and developers quickly formed. In addition, GE and other organizations began to support of the software. In 1998, Will Schroeder and Ken Martin left GE to form Kitware Inc..

With the founding of Kitware, the VTK community grew rapidly, and toolkit usage expanded into academic, research and commercial applications. For example, VTK forms the core of the Slicer (http://slicer.org) biomedical computing application, and numerous research papers at IEEE Visualization and other conferences based on VTK have appeared. VTK has been used on a large 1024-processor computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to process nearly a Petabyte of data. In 2005, ParaView (based on VTK) was used to real-time rendering of a ZSU23-4 Russian Anti-Aircraft vehicle being hit by a planar wave, with 2.5 billion cell calculation, in the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. VTK also forms the basis of several collaborations between Kitware and national organizations such as Sandia, Los Alamos, and Livermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for their large data visualization needs. VTK is also one of the key computing tools for the recently established National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, NA-MIC (http://www.na-mic.org), part of NIH's roadmap initiative for future computing tools.

Recently work on VTK includes a significant expansion of the toolkit to support the ingestion, processing and display of informatics data.^{[citation needed]} That work is supported by Sandia National Laboratories under the 'Titan' project and represents one of the first concentrated efforts to unify scientific visualization with informatics functionality.