The virtual windtunnel-an environment for the exploration of three-dimensional unsteady flows

We describe a recently completed implementation of a virtual environment for exploring numerically-generated three-dimensional unsteady flowfields. A boom-mounted six degree of freedom head-position-sensitive stereo CRT system is used for viewing. A hand position sensitive glove controller is used for injecting various tracers (e.g.. “smoke”) into the virtual flowfield. A mutiprocessor graphics workstation is used for computation and rendering. We describe our techniques for visualizing unsteady flows and discuss the computer requirements for a variety of visualization techniques. These techniques generalize to visualization of other three-dimensional vector fields.