A typical use case is to visualize images from a CT or MRI scan. DeskVOX accepts TIFF files as a source, which will be converted to a 3D volume file, which can be viewed interactively. Several visual features support the exploration of such data sets: zoom, pan, a clipping plane, a region of interest, viewer settings, and stereo modes.
One distinguishing feature of DeskVOX is its capability to display multi-channel data sets, for instance up to four channel confocal data sets. Another uncommon feature is that not only data sets with 8 bits per voxel are supported, but also 16 bit integers and 32 bit floating point values. Furthermore, several 3D stereo modes are available.
The volume rendering routines require a graphics card with hardware based texturing acceleration. Most graphics cards built after 2001 (GeForce3, Radeon, etc.) have this capability. Newer graphics cards and those with more texture memory will achieve higher performance and will render bigger data sets.
DeskVOX comes with the command line utility VConv, which converts between a variety of image and volume data formats. It also converts volume data sets between different data formats, or it resamples data sets to different sizes.
The GUI of DeskVOX uses FOX Toolkit, which is an open-source, cross-platform library for user interface development. The Windows version of DeskVOX auto-installs thanks to the Nullsoft Install System (NSIS).