Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

Researchers doing scientific computations are attempting to accurately model physical phenomena. When these physical phenomena take place at a variety of different spatial and temporal scales it can be more efficient and accurate to model them at different levels of detail in an adaptive, hierarchical manner. We present a framework for visualizing adaptive, hierarchical computations- a conceptual framework and an implementation framework. Given that researchers have already defined a hierarchical structure for their data and are performing their computations using this structure, it has become important to provide a visualization tool which accurately represents this data and visualizes it directly. The tool we have designed for this purpose was built using the Visualization Toolkit, VTK, and one of its interpretive interfaces, Tcl/Tk. In addition to creating a visualization tool, we are developing extensions of visualiztion techniques and algorithms to hierarchiacal data (i.e., seamless isosurface generation).