Visual analysis of three-dimensional flow field based on WebVR

Abstract

Abstract With the rapid development of internet technologies, it is possible to provide computing services and visualize calculated results on the internet. A three-dimensional flow field visualization method based on WebVR is presented in this paper. We devised and built an immersive and interactive three-dimensional virtual reality scene employing web-standard technologies (i.e., HTML5, JavaScript, WebGL, and Ajax) and computing services provided by hydrodynamic software, using GPUs to accelerate the display of flow field in the browser, without the use of plug-ins. On the basis of three-dimensional topography and surface flow field, a three-dimensional flow field presentation method of superimposing multiple sections into the original computational domain was proposed. Furthermore, the description of tracer sphere and path line was adopted to describe the structure characteristics of the flow field. Replacing complete three-dimensional sphere models with textured stylized particles improved the frame rate of the browser greatly when rendering animations. This research enables developers and users of the hydrodynamic model to be immersed in their data of flow field using Google Cardboard. As far as we know, this is the first time that WebVR technology has been applied in three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulation.