Scientific visualization in virtual reality - interaction techniques and application development

tools: In addition to these spatial tools we have also created abstract tools such as the color mapper widget and the time control widget. These widgets can be connected to the color mapper and the data sources, and provide direct interactive control of these abstract parameters of the visualization pipeline. Although the design and implementation of the basic concept itself took a substantial amount of time and effort, this paid off in increase of code stability, readability, flexibility, and development time of visualization applications for the Responsive Workbench. By using an object-oriented design, new application specific tools can be derived and extended relatively easily from the basic classes and tools provided. Also, the abstract layer provided by the data object offers an effective interface to the data for new visualization techniques. VRX also contains improved 3D interaction and exploration techniques, as described in Section 5.1. We have applied the VRX concept on several case studies, see Chapter 6.