Scientific Visualisation

The term Scientific Visualisation applies mainly to the use of advanced 2D- and 3D-visualisation in the Natural Sciences. Starting from the introduction of the visualisation system AVS in 1992, scientific visualisation was the the main type of visualisation supported by the Center for Information Technology. Presently other types of visualisation, as shown in the project list, grow in importance.

A gallery of visualisation examples.

Visualisation software

The public domain Visualisation ToolKit VTK is used for advanced problems, the contract with AVS is finished in 2004. The Center for Information Technology developed a large collection of examples of VTK: the RugVTK-examples. These examples embody experience with a lot of practical scientific visualisation applications.

Amira is a promising new visualisation program with special features for medical applications. Amira is available at the Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics group of the Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, RUG.

Porting to VR environment

Scientific visualisation applications can be ported with minimal effort to the CAVE and the Theatre.

• How to import VTK (Visualisation ToolKit) data in the Reality Theatre?

Other software

Information visualisation is used for the visualisation of large, complex data sets such as a collections of Web documents or a file system on the hard disk.

In the past, the Center for Information Technology invested a lot of effort in the development of the 2D graphing system KOMPLOT, that still exits. Version 8.2 (December 2004) is available for Linux, SGI, SUN and Cray.

See the Dutch paper "De virtuele Titanic" for an explanation of the following picture and CFD Visualisation in Virtual Reality - The Titanic resurrected by Michael ten Caat. This is an example of a VTK-application that was ported to VR equipment.

Data visualisation links