Texture-based flow visualization in augmented and virtual reality environments

Virtual and Augmented Reality allows a new way of result exploration of numerical simulations, its analysis and interpretation by immersing the user into the data sets and/or by keeping the relationship and context to the real environment. Up to date only a few approaches targeting the deployment of augmented reality during the analysis stage have been published. The handling of large data sets at interactive rates becomes a crucial bottleneck and influences the successful introduction for augmented reality solutions within this area. The data exploration using different VR based solutions have shown how to ease the understanding and interpretation of complex 3D data sets using stereoscopic presentations of vector glyphs, path-, stream, streak lines or surfaces. New texture based visualization tools emerged and conciliate a better understanding of the flow fields. In this paper we describe our approach for the integration of texture based visualization methods within a mixed reality set-up during the analysis stage by introducing a 'low cost', fully 3D interactive post processing unit for large CFD data sets.