Interactive Visualization Of Large Scale Time-Varying Datasets

Abstract: Visualization of large scale time-varying volumetric datasets is an active topic of research. Technical limitations in terms of bandwidth and memory usage become a problem when visualizing these datasets on commodity computers at interactive frame rates. The overall objective is to overcome these limitations by adapting the methods of an existing Direct Volume Rendering pipeline. The objective is considered to be a proof of concept to assess the feasibility of visualizing large scale time-varying datasets using this pipeline. The pipeline consists of components from previous research, which make extensive use of graphics hardware to visualize large scale static data on commodity computers. This report presents a diploma work, which adapts the pipeline to visualize flow features concealed inside the large scale Computational Fluid Dynamics dataset. The work provides a foundation to address the technical limitations of the commodity computer to visualize time-varying datasets. The report describes the components making up the Direct Volume Rendering pipeline together with the adaptations. It also briefly describes the Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation, the flow features and an earlier visualization approach to show the system’s limitations when exploring the dataset.