BRL-CAD displays its raytracing output as it is generated by using a framebuffer. Currently BRL-CAD has specific framebuffers for X11 Opengl (ogl), Windows OpenGL (wgl), and raw X11 (X), in addition to a variety of more special purpose and experimental framebuffers. A single, high performance, cross platform framebuffer is of interest to BRL-CAD.
This task, could utilize a cross-platform application framework such as Qt or OGRE or it could utilize some other approach. In addition to Qt or OGRE, another candidate could be the pxCore library ( http://code.google.com/p/pxcore/ ) or GLUT.
Whatever the solution, it would ideally be implemented in such a way that it can be embedded into a Tk window and be a "drop in replacement" for existing stand-alone and embedded graphical framebuffers on multiple platforms. Hardware acceleration should not be required, but leveraging it automatically when it's available would be great.
A good proposal for this task will need to spell out a fair number of specifics and should do some homework - "research and implement framebuffer code" would be a weak submission. The X11 framebuffer (if_X24.c) would be good code to review when developing a proposal for this task.