The availability of geoscience seismic volume data sets motivated the development of techniques for viewing such volume data sets in three dimensions (3D) rather than as raw data or individual planes. Volume rendering techniques now play an important role in many areas of geoscience data visualization.

This thesis provides background on volume rendering, including rendering algorithms, and introduces a high-performance 3D rendering toolkit provides by SGI, OpenGL VolumizerTM. Using OpenGL VolumizerTM, volume rendering of geoscience raw data was implemented. This application was developed and implemented in C++ with OpenGL VolumizerTM. A volume data set of 128 x 128 x 128 geoscience raw data was used as the input data. The application also provides X-window graphic user interface (GUI) which is convenient for the user to view and explore the image. This feature will be of particular interest to geoscientist, esp. geophysicist who wants to study the Earth for all kinds of exploration such as finding new sources of oil and natural gas, searching for mineral resources, hydrological studies, sit planning.