research-article

Interactive ray casting of geodesic grids

Authors:

Kwan-Liu MaAuthors Info & Claims

EuroVis '13: Proceedings of the 15th Eurographics Conference on Visualization

Pages 481 - 490

https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.12135

Published: 17 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Geodesic grids are commonly used to model the surface of a sphere and are widely applied in numerical simulations of geoscience applications. These applications range from biodiversity, to climate change and to ocean circulation. Direct volume rendering of scalar fields defined on a geodesic grid facilitates scientists in visually understanding their large scale data. Previous solutions requiring to first transform the geodesic grid into another grid structure (e.g., hexahedral or tetrahedral grid) for using graphics hardware are not acceptable for large data, because such approaches incur significant computing and storage overhead. In this paper, we present a new method for efficient ray casting of geodesic girds by leveraging the power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). A geodesic grid can be directly fetched from storage or streamed from simulations to the rendering stage without the need of any intermediate grid transformation. We have designed and implemented a new analytic scheme to efficiently perform value interpolation for ray integration and gradient calculations for lighting. This scheme offers a more cost-effective rendering solution over the existing direct rendering approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our rendering solution using real-world geoscience data.

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Cited By

Liu SChen GYao STian FLiu W(2017)A framework for interactive visual analysis of heterogeneous marine data in an integrated problem solving environmentComputers & Geosciences10.1016/j.cageo.2017.03.021104:C(20-28)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cageo.2017.03.021

Index Terms

Interactive ray casting of geodesic grids
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Rendering
      1. Ray tracing
  2. Modeling and simulation
    1. Simulation types and techniques
      1. Visual analytics
2. Theory of computation
  1. Randomness, geometry and discrete structures
    1. Computational geometry

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

EuroVis '13: Proceedings of the 15th Eurographics Conference on Visualization

June 2013

508 pages

Conference Chair:
Gerik Scheuermann
University of Leipzig, Germany

Sponsors

KAUST: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
UFZ: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
NVIDIA
IRTG: DFG's International Research Training Group 1131
Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany: Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany
Uinv. Leipzig: Universität Leipzig
DFG: German Research Council
IBM: IBM

Publisher

The Eurographs Association & John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chichester, United Kingdom

Publication History

Published: 17 June 2013

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Cited By

Liu SChen GYao STian FLiu W(2017)A framework for interactive visual analysis of heterogeneous marine data in an integrated problem solving environmentComputers & Geosciences10.1016/j.cageo.2017.03.021104:C(20-28)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cageo.2017.03.021

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