Why is real-time volume rendering no longer a year away?

Something new is happening in computer graphics. Volume rendering matured as a method for visualizing 3D sampled, simulated, and synthetic datasets. With a booming interest in real-time interactive volume rendering, and with a volume rendering chip being fabricated, volume rendering is a technology whose time has come. In addition to traditional polygonal rendering, commercial graphics systems now offer 3-D volumetric capabilities, and will soon offer volume rendering hardware accelerators.