What´s New
Amira 5.2
Several important changes and imporvements have been introduced in Amira with the release 5.2. Amira is now even more powerful and even more focussed on Life Science.
Get an idea of how it looks like with some snapshot and see the technical release details and documentation!
Supported Platforms
- Windows – Windows® 2000/XP/Vista, 32-bit and 64-bit editions.
- Mac OS - Mac OS® X 10.5 (Leopard) with Intel CPU.
- Linux – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 for x86_64 or compatible; the software can work on other distributions too, but it is not guaranteed and verified.
System Requirements
- CPU supporting SSE2 instruction set. (Intel Pentium 4 / Celeron with Willamette kernel or more recent; AMD Athlon 64 / Opteron or Sempron with Paris kernel or more recent)
- At least 512 MB RAM
- Graphics card with OpenGL support and hardware accelerated texture mapping. Some visualization modules require graphics hardware with recent vertex and fragment shader support and a recent driver.
Recommended Hardware
- CPU - Multi-core CPU with 2 GHz; On Mac OS X an Intel CPU is recommended.
- Memory - 2 GB RAM
- Graphics card - A current "gaming" card of one of the main vendors (NVIDIA or ATI) with at least 512 MB video RAM is recommended. If OpenGL stereo support is needed (e.g AmiraVR or stereo projection), an NVIDIA Quadro FX or an ATI FireGL / FirePro card with the appropriate driver has to be installed.
In order to add custom extensions to Amira using the Developer Option, a C++ compiler is also required. The following C++ compilers are supported:
- Windows – Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0). Please note that Visual Studio 2008 is not officially supported.
- Mac OS X – GNU gcc 4.0.x with the latest version of XCode provided by Apple
- Linux – GNU gcc 4.1.x
New Multi Planar Viewer
The new Multi Planar Viewer is a special purpose sub-application for visualizing and exploring up to two data sets simultaneously using three Multi-Planar Reformat (MPR) viewers and one 3D viewer showing the data set(s) as volume rendering(s). The visualized volumes cannot only be explored and compared, but they can also be aligned and registered using integrated tools. This viewer is dedicated explicitly to users in biomedical research who need to visually explore and/or register image data with a few clicks in an easy-to-use and high quality visualization framework. The Multi Planar Viewer is part of the Amira Standard Edition.
New Tridelity module for autostereoscopic display
New module TridelityView allows the main Amira viewer to be displayed in the following autostereoscopic displays: Tridelity Multi-View 19", 27", 42", and 57".
New readers and writers
- New SWC reader and writer for neuroscience – The new Duke-Southampton SWC reader and writer for neuronal morphology supports the import and export in SWC format. This format can be used, for example, with the cvapp application allowing the conversion between various neuron morphology formats.
- New Olympus OIB/OIF readers for images acquired with Olympus confocal microscopes of the FluoView 1000 generation.
- Added support for 1-bit TIFF images.
New display modules
The new display modules to visualize 2D slices with 3D surface effects make the exploration of the volume easier and more flexible even for very large data sets:
- New BumpSlice display module. Displays orthogonal slices with embossed mapping on any regular scalar field.
- New CityPlot display module. This module displays a scalar data field as a 3D histogram.
- New ClusterStringLabels display module. This module visualizes string labels associated with data objects of type Cluster.
Enhaced Filament Editor interface (Microscopy/ResolveRT Option)
The user interface of the Filament Editor has been reorganized to enable a faster and more accurate tracing, and an enhanced structural representation of filament networks:
- In order to facilitate the use of the tools, only two tabs are now available in the tool box, the View Options and the Tools tabs.
- The Autoskeleton Options and the graph analysis tools have been reorganized in the Tools tab.
- A new icon has been added to the toolbar to activate the tracer, while the tracing options have been moved into the Tools tab.
- The Preview option toggle has been removed. Instead, there is now a button next to the Window Level slider similar to the Segmentation Editor. When the button is pressed, the Alpha slider is available below the Window Level slider.
- The Show Thick Slice toggle has been removed from the tool box. The functionality is now available as a button next to the Thickness slider.
Improved hardware compatibility with Volren
Added support for a wide range of graphics boards (see System Requirements above).
Improved documentation compatibility with Volren
New tutorials and demos designed for Life Science and a faster keyword-searching algorithm allow the user to easily extend the application knowledge.
Further improvements and new modules
- Improved DemoMaker - The DemoMaker script has been improved for handling complex sequences.
- Improved user interface of the Measurement Tool - The handling of the measurement tool has been reworked so that the Add button has become obsolete. The tool is activated by clicking the button in the viewer tool bar. When active, clicking in the viewer creates and modifies measurements or annotations.
- New LDA Display Modules - The new interpolation type (“multi-samples”) on LDA ortho and oblique slices provides much higher quality images than linear interpolation. ArithmeticRendering: arbitrary arithmetic according to a user-defined arithmetic expression of up to three inputs according to a user-defined arithmetic expression. CastLattice: changes or converts the primitive data type of out-of-core data.
- Improved LDA OrthoSlice and ObliqueSlice - The new interpolation type (“multi-samples”) on LDA ortho and oblique slices provides much higher quality images than linear interpolation.
- Improved Voltex LDA -
The Voltex LDA module has been improved in quality and performance options.
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