The Virtual Windtunnel
Steve Bryson
CSC/NASA Ames Research Center
The virtual windtunnel is an application of virtual reality to the visualization of pre-computed simulated fluid flows. As a virtual reality system, it presents a genuine application of VR, involving severe interface, computation, graphics, and data management issues. How these issues were addressed will be a primary focus of the talk. As a scientific visualization system, is presents a fully three-dimensional interface to a very complex three dimensional problem: understanding the behavior of time-varying three-dimensional fluid flows. User reaction to the virtual windtunnel will be briefly discussed, along with a discussion of preliminary evaluation efforts.