3D VR engine

Abstract

High-performance computing (HPC) has caused the data size for the simulation models increasingly larger everyday. Consequently the resulting data grow as well. This makes the visualization tasks demand HPC power too. At NCHC, this issue of visualizing large data set has incurred since the end of 90s. So we started to design the tool sets for large data visualization in 2002. 3D VR Engine is an object-oriented toolkit for developing interactive virtual reality applications. It includes eight features, stereo display, discrete level-of-detail (LOD), large data set, tile texture (Blythe, 1999), 3D true type fonts, XML scene description language, user specified key binding, voxel projection volume rendering. It also includes some basic graphics algorithms, such as vector, matrix, bounding box, and several geometric object loaders and many image readers. Based on this toolkit, we can develop visualization and virtual reality applications relatively easily in a short period of time. This paper discusses the architecture and some modules.