TWO HANDED EXPLORATION OF THREE DIMENSIONAL VECTOR FIELDS

A series of tools and techniques is described for the exploration of three-dimensional vector fields in an immersive Virtual Environment (VE). Vector fields can be identified with any scientific datasets where each element has three scalar components and a location in space. Typical datasets are the ones coming from CFD computations or other finite elements analysis. Therefore it is possible to make three-dimensional visualization and exploration of fluids behaviour, electromagnetic fields, force fields, etc. The system described is meant to be an advanced Virtual Reality-based post-processing tool for fast and intuitive data analysis. The datasets are visualized in a 3D environment using many different methods. The environment includes different kinds of geometric entities: hand-held exploration tools, 3d models to represent physical bodies, plus a 3D representation of some portion of the vector field. Hand-held exploration tools are 3D objects whose location in the VE is related to the position and orientation of tracked user’s hands. The kind of interaction with the VE is a two-handed proprioceptive navigation and manipulation. Different tools have been designed to explore the dataset, each of them working with a different kind of visualization. Some tools can generate streamlines with different constraints, others can select bounding boxes to show the 3d-vectors contained in a restricted volume, others can create color-mapped surfaces. The interactive tools and the immersive VE aim to make vector-fields exploration easier and more intuitive.