Thank you!! More VTK Innovation is on the way....

Announcements
1

I’d like to thank you, the many VTK community members, for helping Kitware recently win a four year research and innovation grant from the National Institutes of Health. My belief is that our community of users and developers were instrumental in making this happen. Whether it’s building VTK applications like ParaView, Slicer, and trame; contributing code; answering questions and writing examples; or providing feedback, support and encouragement, our community has helped the system grow into the incredible computing resource that it is. Which means that reviewers, and in the case of the NIH, the biomedical computing community, have taken note and value VTK enough to financially support it.

There is a lot of exciting work ahead. First, we want to continue to position VTK as the ubiquitous visualization system across as many platforms as possible.This award will accelerate out development of the WebGPU backend, meaning support for modern rendering APIs including Metal and Vulkan. Also, we will expand out WebAssembly support, making it easier to move C++ code onto the web browser. And enhancing Python support will also be important.

Secondly, we want to consider ways to make VTK more supportive of AI-related work, as well as leverage AI capabilities to improve VTK’s visualization capabilities. This may include developing techniques for AI explainability, as well as using AI to configure multidimensional transfer functions for volume rendering.

Finally, we are investigating Copilot-like AI resources for VTK. The idea is to help guide new and established users towards more effective use of VTK. Fortunately, as an opens source system, VTK provides a wealth of resources ranging from code, through books, examples, blog posts, and community exchanges, on which to train such AI tools.

We are currently formulating detailed R&D plans and so would like to hear from you if you have any suggestions or feedback. And of course, if you want to participate in the fun by providing help or funding, let us know – we can make these and other capabilities happen faster, and be more responsive to and effective for our community needs.

Thanks again,
Will

10 Likes
2

Thanks for the update, this is awesome news! The topics that you described (native web support, better Python integration, extended AI capabilities, copilot for describing processing tasks via natural language, improved volume rendering) are almost an exact match of top priorities for 3D Slicer for the next few years. We have a lot of use cases for you and would be happy to work on them together with Kitware and the VTK community.

3

Bring it on Andras :slight_smile: Any feedback, use cases, etc. are very welcome.

4

This is great Will! We have lots of ideas : )