The transfer function bake-off (panel session)

As anybody even vaguely familiar with volume rendering knows, finding good transfer functions is very difficult. Pat Hanrahan called it one of the top 10 problems in volume visualization in his inspiring keynote address at the Symposium on Volume Visualization ’92. And it seems that today, almost a decade later, there are still no good solutions at hand. Or are there? In this panel, we pitch four of the currently most promising approaches to transfer function design against each other. The four approaches are: