Interactive exploration of unsteady 3D flow with linked 2D/3D texture advection

In this paper, we present linked 2D/3D texture advection for the interactive exploration of 3D flow. 3D texture advection facilitates a dense representation of the 3D structure of unsteady flow but is subject to problems of occlusion and clutter. Therefore, it is difficult for the user to explore features in occluded regions. We overcome the occlusion problem by adopting an additional 2D representation on several parallel slices through the data set. By linking these two views, our approach allows the user to gain unrestricted access to all spatial areas of the data set and, at the same time, retain a view on the 3D nature of the flow. Furthermore, the 2D view is used to visualize an additional attribute of the data set by color coding, such as vortex strength, temperature, or velocity magnitude. The 2D view lets the user explore flow features by selecting interesting values in this attribute space. A brushing and linking mechanism provides immediate feedback by highlighting selected data values in both the 2D and 3D representations. Finally, we discuss a GPU implementation of our visualization approach that is the technical basis for interactive exploration and real-time visualization without the need for preprocessing.