Selective visualization is a solution for visualizing data of large size and dimensionality. In this paper a new method is proposed for effectively rendering certain chosen parts among the full set of data in terms of a colour buffer, referred to as the virtual plane, for storing intermediate results. By this method, scientists may concentrate their attention on the contents of data in which they are interested. Besides, the method could be easily integrated with all the current direct volume rendering techniques, especially progressive refinement methods and selective methods.

Real-time visualization of particle traces in virtual environments can aid in the exploration and analysis of complex three dimensional vector fields. This paper introduces a scalable method suitable for the interactive visualization of large time-varying vector fields on commodity hardware. A real-time data streaming and visualization approach and its out-of-core scheme for the pre-processing and rendering of data are described. The presented approach yields low-latency application start-up times and small memory footprints. A proof of concept systems was implemented on a low-cost Linux workstation equipped with spatial tracking hardware, data gloves and shutter glasses. The system was used to implement a virtual wind tunnel in which a volumetric particle injector can introduce up to 60000 particles into the flow field while an interactive rendering performance of 60 frames per second is maintained.