Abstract

This thesis covers new research into real-time rendering of volumetric carbon dioxide data collected in the Vulcan project. The Vulcan project, a multi-disciplinary initiative to quantify carbon dioxide mass flux from residential, commercial and industrial sources headed by Gurney et al ( Gurney, K. R., Mendoza, D. L., Zhou, Y., Fischer, M. L., Miller, C. C., Geethakumar, S., and de La Rue du Can, S. , 2009). The Vulcan datasets are a significant aid for policy makers, scientists and the general public alike as the collection was completed at a much finer space and time resolution than ever before.

A previous visualization attempt, completed in 2009 (Andrysco, Gurney, Benes, & Corbin, 2009) was able to visualize the data in an offline environment, noting constraints of data size and disk speed access as the most significant drawbacks for real-time visualization.

This thesis presents research towards a new real-time visualization suite in the areas of compression, data representation and simplification. The research hypothesizes that the use of these techniques will enable sufficient speed of rendering and loading to enable real-time data exploration.

The results show that a combination of techniques used in compression and the use of optimized indexed geometric structures allows the dataset to be explored and rendered in real time

Keywords

Real, Time, Volume, Rendering, Point, Triangles, Carbon, Dioxide

Date of this Version

4-21-2010

Department

Computer Graphics Technology

Department Head

Dr. Marvin Serapin

Month of Graduation

May

Year of Graduation

2010

Degree

Master of Science

Head of Graduate Program

Dr. James Mohler

Advisor 1 or Chair of Committee

Dr. Bedrich Benes

Committee Member 1

Dr. Kevin Gurney

Committee Member 2

Dr. James Mohler

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