Computational field visualization

ManuscriptToday, scientists, engineers, and medical researchers routinely use computers to simulate complex physical phenomena. Such simulations present new challenges for computational scientists, including the need to effectively analyze and visualize complex three-dimensional data. As simulations become more complex and produce larger amounts of data, the effectiveness of utilizing such high resolution data will hinge upon the ability of human experts to interact with their data and extract useful information. Here we describe recent work at the SCI Institute in large-scale scalar, vector, and tensor visualization techniques. We end with a discussion of ideas for the integration of techniques for creating computational multi-field visualizations

Prototype system for synergistic data display

Journal ArticleMultimodal interfaces have been shown to increase user performance for a variety of tasks. We have been investigating the synergistic benefits of haptic scientific visualization using an integrated, semi-immersive virtual environment. The Visual Haptic Workbench provides multimodal interaction; immersion is enhanced by head and hand tracking, haptic feedback, and additional audio cues. We present the motivation, design and implementation of the prototype system and describe some challenges ahead in the context of questions to be answered. Preliminary results indicate that visualization combined with haptic rendering intuitively conveys the salient characteristics of scientific data

22 The Visual Haptic Workbench

Haptic feedback is a promising interaction modality for a variety of applications. Successful examples include robot teleoperation [57], virtua

Importance Driven Texture Coordinate Optimization

Traditionally, texture coordinates have been generated based solely on the model's geometry, often even before a model's textures have been created. With the arrival of new technologies, such as 3D paint programs, weaknesses of a static optimization pre-process are becoming apparent. These weaknesses arise from constructing a parameterization based solely on the model's geometry, ignoring the fact that detail is not uniformly spaced throughout the texture space. In fact, certain regions of the texture are more important than other regions. In this paper we introduce the notion of the "importance map" and describe how importance values are derived from both intrinsic properties of the texture and user-guided highlights. Furthermore, we describe how importance maps are used to drive the texture coordinate optimization. Finally, we show how this optimization process can be integrated into a 3D painting environment, enabling periodic optimization at any stage of texture design. Ad..

Sort-First, Distributed Memory Parallel Visualization and Rendering

While commodity computing and graphics hardware has increased in capacity and dropped in cost, it is still quite difficult to make effective use of such systems for general-purpose parallel visualization and graphics. We describe the results of a recent project that provides a software infrastructure suitable for general-purpose use by parallel visualization and graphics applications. Our work combines and extends two technologies: Chromium, a stream-oriented framework that implements the OpenGL programming interface; and OpenRM Scene Graph, a pipelined-parallel scene graph interface for graphics data management. Using this combination, we implement a sort-first, distributed memory, parallel volume rendering application. We describe the performance characteristics in terms of bandwidth requirements and highlight key algorithmic considerations needed to implement the sort-first system. We characterize system performance using a distributed memory parallel volume rendering application, a nd present performance gains realized by using scene specific knowledge to accelerate rendering through reduced network bandwidth. The contribution of this work is an exploration of general-purpose, sort-first architecture performance characteristics as applied to distributed memory, commodity hardware, along with a description of the algorithmic support needed to realize parallel, sort-first implementations