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