| As the scale and complexity of scientific simulations is increasing at least as rapidly as available computing power, new methods for analyzing and understanding the generated data have to be developed. We believe that interactive visualization is a promising approach to analyze large scientific data sets, and that computational steering, i.e., the “live” coupling of an interactive visualization system and a simulation system, with the visualization system being used as a user interface to change simulation parameters on-the-fly, is valuable to decrease the overall computation time spent to generate an intended simulation result.; We describe how existing conventional visualization methods can be adapted to work in an interactive environment, how a framework can be developed that is general enough to easily be coupled with a wide range of simulation codes, and how recent advances in virtual reality can benefit interactive visualization. We illustrate our points with a set of visualization/steering systems that have been developed or are under development at the Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing (CIPIC) at the University of California, Davis. |
