Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

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.