Visualization of Fluid Flows in Virtual Environments

As computational methods keep improving and computational resources are entering a new era, the solution to physical problems is available at very high resolutions. Unfortunately, the computational resources that are available for interactive visualization of the solution at this resolution are not as accessible, hence the need to resort to alternative display techniques which can portray a better understanding of the solution, even at a lesser resolution. In this paper, we discuss methods for visualizing fluid data in a virtual environment. For steady-state data sets, we employ a feature-based streamline seeding technique. For time-variant data sets, we utilize view-dependent seeded pathlines. These methods address the aforementioned problems with high resolution data sets. In addition, we present the advantages of using virtual environments for flow visualization, and how analysts benefit from these advantages.