Tech Report CS-93-54

Direct Manipulation of Isosurfaces and Cutting Planes in Virtual Environments

Tom Meyer and Al Globus

December 1993

Abstract:

We present some novel interface techniques for the visualization of scalar field data in virtual reality (VR) environments. In particular, we discuss the direct manipulation of isosurfaces and cutting planes and give general guidelines for design of user interfaces and algorithms for scientific visualization in virtual environments. This work was motivated by the need to visualize scalar field data from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations interactively in the Virtual Wind Tunnel at NASA Ames, but the techniques are applicable to other problem areas, including medical imaging and geological and mathematical visualization.

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