Projects since 2005

The newer projects are listed at IVL's Projects page
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Projects 2003-2005

ImmuneAttack: An interactive game to teach students how the human immune system works; a collaboration with the Federation of American Scientists and the University of Southern California.
DOE project Application-Driven Research, Development, and Evaluation of Interactive Scientific Visualization Techniques in Multiple Working Environments. A collaboration with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Coupled Deskvox with a remote server providing CT images on SOAP requests. Added support for DDS image format. This project was a collaboration with Shirley Cohen of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. A publication is in preparation for 2006.
Visualizing hurricane Isabel: submission to IEEE Visualization 2004 contest. Details:
J.P. Schulze, A.S. Forsberg
"User Friendly Volume Data Set Exploration in the Cave"
White paper for the IEEE Visualization 2004 contest, Austin, TX, October 2004
Visualizing ocean currents: a collaboration with Prof. Balasubramanian from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. We volume rendered time series of ocean simulation data and displayed them in the Cave. The major contribution of this project is a method to convert the simulation data, which uses differently thick layers of water, to a data format that can be volume rendered without losing too much detail of the original data. For details see:
D. Ehrens, A. Tandon, R. Balasubramanian, J.P. Schulze
"Volume Rendering with Animation of Gulf Stream Currents"
Technical Report CS-05-03, Brown University, Department of Computer Science, March 2005

Projects 1999-2003

Audio Server Marc Schreier created an audio server for virtual reality environments like the Cube at HLRS, with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound equipment. The server is called AudioServerDX, and there is a separate home page for it.
Provided parallelized shear-warp algorithm and support for Brett Beeson of Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) to build parallel volume rendering system DVR (Distributed Volume Renderer). The system visualizes large astronomical data sets in real-time. For details see:
B. Beeson, D.G. Barnes, P.D. Bourke
"A Distributed-Data Implementation of the Perspective Shear-Warp Volume Rendering Algorithm for Visualisation of Large Astronomical Cubes"
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA), Volume 20, Number 3, 2003
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/papers/pasa2003/
The volume rendering library Virvo is part of the visualization framework COVISE
In cooperation with project A10 (Strongly Correlated Fermions), the earlier visualization tool for 2D worldlines has been extended by a method to visualize 1D Worldlines. In the visualization, the atoms are located on a line with periodic boundaries, represented as a circle. The third coordinate axis represents time, so that the atoms stay on the surface of a cylinder. Atom paths which cross the boundary are colored differently from the rest. In case you have a VRML browser, you can download a 3D model.
In collaboration with project C14 (MD Simulation of Quasi Crystals) at the Institute for Theroetical and Applied Physics a virtual reality interface was developed to interactively visualize data from the molecular simulation tool IMD while the simulation is running. The current atom configuration can be requested via a TCP connection at any time. Elaborated data transfer parameters allow to control the required bandwidth for the data transfer. By limiting the number of parameters used, the nearly real-time visualization of a running simulation is possible. A movie clip (AVI, 51 MB) demonstrates the usage of this system in a CAVE.
Again with project C14, the HLRS's visualization system COVISE was extended by support for the visualization of quasi crystals. In the collaboration, a read module for ITAP's IMD data format was developed which allows the direct input of atom configurations into the visualization system. The parameters which are to be visualized can be selected in a COVISE network. Typically the atoms are displayed as spheres, which are assigned a radius and a color, depending on the atom parameters. Additionally, the spheres can be distorted to ellipsoids in order to visualize vector parameters. This visualization method, along with 3D representation and time dependency, substantially improved the researchers' process of analysis. Alternatively, the atom data can be resampled to a regular grid to be visualized with direct volume visualization approaches. An example for a time dependent dataset, visualized with volume rendering can be viewed in a 200 time steps animation (AVI, 1.2 MB) of a crack propagation in a quasi crystal.
In a cooperation with project C15 (Granular Media) the method of volume rendering developed in D2 was applied to the granular gases examined in C15. Additionally to the single time step which you can see at the left, you can watch the animation (AVI, 8 MB) of a clustering process. The film shows two passes of this process.
In a cooperation with project C16 (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, SPH) of the Institute for theoretical astro-physics at the University of Tübingen datasets created with the SPH simulation program were visualized. Two visualization approaches were compared: the visualization of the atoms with polygonal spheres of adjustable radius, as well as volume visualization, after resampling the particle dataset to a regular grid. Additonal to the image on the left, you will find images with differently sized atoms taken from different view points here: [1], [2], [3]. Furthermore, you can watch an animation of the dataset, which consists of 20 simulation steps: top view (AVI, 950 KB) or side view(AVI, 44 KB). Alternatively, you can view an animated volume visualization (AVI, 6.8 MB) of the same dataset.
Together with project D4 and the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing of the Swinburne University in Australia, the visualization tool DVR was developed. It allows the display of astronomical volume data on parallel computers, using the perspective shear-warp algorithm. Examples for this collaboration can be found at the web site of the Swinburne University.
The technique of using pre-integrated data values in the compositing of the shear-warp was developed in collaboration with project D6. The idea is to use look-up tables that are created on every change of the transfer function. Instead of using bilinear interpolation in the compositing, color and opacity can be read from the table, which yields higher image quality. This work is described in a paper, which was accepted at the Volume Graphics conference.
In collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Physical Metallurgy and Metal Physics in Stuttgart a COVISE module was developed, which allows the animated visualization of simulations of the mechanical behavior of thin structures. The metal is deformed by a shear force, and the simulation tool computes the resulting atom movements. The basis of this collaboration was the software for the display of world lines, which was a collaboration with project A10. The image at the left shows one time step of such a visualization.
In a collaboration with the radiological institute of the Olgahospital in Stuttgart MRI scans were reconstructed and visualized in 3D. The images were available in several modalities, which resulted from different scanning parameters. With this method, we could interpret the images as multi-modal data and visualize them in collaboration with Professor Hansen from the University of Utah at Salt Lake City.
Several microbiological datasets were visualized in collaboration with the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan. Because the Taiwanese group also used COVISE, they could visualize the data in their own virtual environment.
Prof. Landstorfer from the Institute of Radio Frequency Technology at the University of Stuttgart works on simulations to examine the effects of electromagnetical waves on the human body. Data from the Visible Human Project is used as the basis for the simulations. The simulation results are visualized with the volume visualization techniques which have been developed in project D2.
In collaboration with the Department of Zoology at the Biological Institute of the University of Stuttgart, volumetric data from CT scans of parts of dolphins were visualized. The goal of the Department of Zoology is the entire reconstruction of a dolphin, in analogy to the Visible Human Project.
Together with the Institute for Computational Physics of the University of Stuttgart simulations of the water flow through porous media (e.g., sandstone) were visualized with volume rendering and displayed in the CAVE.