Fast Visualization of 2D Dynamical Systems by the use of Virtual Ink Droplets

This paper presents a new visualization technique for flow fields in 2D. It utilizes a physical model of smearing ink over a sheet of paper as an intuitive metaphor for the representation of a dynamical system. This technique is capable of producing images that are comparable to those generated with line integral convolution (LIC), which is a well-known and established visualization technique for planar vector fields. Similar to oriented line integral convolution (OLIC), an extension to LIC, the virtual ink droplet method is capable of visualizing not only direction and velocity of flow (as LIC does), but also the orientation of vectors. The main advantage of the new method is, that animation sequences, which intuitively represent the dynamics induced by the underlying dynamical system, can be computed much more efficiently than by the use of LIC or OLIC. A speed-up of about 200 is usually achieved when virtual ink droplets are used instead.