Voreen was initiated at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Münster, Germany in 2004 and was first released on 11 April 2008 under the GNU general public license (GPL).

Voreen is written in C++ utilizing the Qt framework and using the OpenGL rendering acceleration API, and is able to achieve high interactive frame rates on consumer graphics hardware.

The source code and documentation, and also pre-compiled binaries for Windows and Linux, are available from its website.

Within the limits of their respective purposes, the processors can be combined freely with each other, and thereby granting a great amount of flexibility and providing a uniform way of handling volume rendering.

Authors who need to implement a certain rendering technique can confine their work basically on the development of new processors, whereas users who only want to access a certain visualization simply need to employ the appropriate processors or networks and do not need to care about technical details.