Enabling interactive scientific data visualization and analysis with see-through hmds and a large tiled display

Abstract

Validation and exploration of the data generated by large-scale scientific simulations rely on sophisticated visualization and analysis tasks. With the advancement of supercomputing, the growing scale and complexity of the data make some of these tasks challenging, which demands new hardware and software solutions. We believe it is possible to address some of the challenges by utilizing the increasingly affordable see-through head mounted display (H-MD) devices together with a low-cost tiled HDTV display. With the tiled display to provide a high-resolution overview of the data, the user can freely choose a small area to explore and analyze using a see-through HMD in stereoscopic 3D with gesture input. During such local exploration and detail data analysis, the user can apply a newly derived visualization parameter setting to the large tiled display for a new overview. In this way, computational costs become more manageable because realtime rendering and response are only required to cover a small screen space and a subset of the data. In our current study, we focus on supporting immersive isosurface and streamline visualization and analysis of 3D flow field data. In this workshop paper, we present our preliminary design and results, and we also discuss our further development and evaluation plan.