History
VTK was initially created in 1993 as companion software to the book "The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" published by Prentice-Hall. The book and software were written by three researchers from (Will Schroeder, Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen) on their own time and with permission from GE (thus the ownership of the software resided with, and continues to reside with, the authors). After the core of VTK was written, users and developers around the world began to improve and apply the system to real-world problems. In particular, GE Medical Systems and other GE businesses graciously contributed to the system. Some researchers, such as Dr. Penny Rheinghans began to teach with the book. Other early supporters included Jim Ahrens at Los Alamos National Labs, and unnamed, but generous oil and gas supporters. In recent years, Sandia National Labs have been strong supporters and co-developers with particular focus on adding information visualization to VTK.
To support what was becoming a large, active and world-wide VTK community Ken and Will, along with Lisa Avila, Charles Law and Bill Hoffman left GE Research to found Kitware Inc. in 1998. Since that time, hundreds of additional developers have created what is now the premier visualization system in the world today.
With the founding of Kitware, the VTK community grew rapidly, and toolkit usage expanded into academic, research and commercial applications. For example, VTK forms the core of the 3DSlicer biomedical computing application, and numerous research papers at IEEE Visualization and other conferences based on VTK have appeared. VTK has been used on a large 1024-processor computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to process nearly a Petabyte of data. In 2005, ParaView (based on VTK) was used for real-time rendering of a ZSU-23-4 Russian Anti-Aircraft vehicle being hit by a planar wave, with 2.5 billion cell calculation, in the United States Army Research Laboratory. VTK also forms the basis of several collaborations between Kitware and national organizations such as Sandia, Los Alamos, and Livermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for their large data visualization needs.
VTK is also one of the key computing tools for the recently established National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, NA-MIC (http://www.na-mic.org), part of NIH's roadmap initiative for future computing tools.
Recently work on VTK includes a significant expansion of the toolkit to support the ingestion, processing and display of informatics data. This work is supported by Sandia National Laboratories under the 'Titan' project and represents one of the first concentrated efforts to unify scientific visualization with informatics functionality.
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