Visualisation of flow fields in the web platform

Abstract

Visualization of vector fields plays an important role in research activities nowadays. Web applications allow a fast, multi-platform and multi-device access to data, which results in the need of optimized applications to be implemented in both high and low-performance devices. The computation of trajectories usually repeats calculations due to the fact that several points might lie over the same trajectory. This paper presents a new methodology to calculate point trajectories over a highly-dense and uniformly-distributed grid of points in which the trajectories are forced to lie over the points in the grid. Its advantages rely on a highly parallel computing implementation and in the reduction of the computational effort to calculate the stream paths since unnecessary calculations are avoided by reusing data through iterations. As case study, the visualization of oceanic streams in the web platform is presented and analyzed, using WebGL as the parallel computing architecture and the rendering engine.