Region-of-interest visualization by CAVE VR system with automatic control of level-of-detail

To specify the region of interest (ROI) is an effective approach to visualize large scale simulation data. We have developed a three-dimensional visualization software with ROI function for the CAVE virtual reality systems. This software enables the user to perform fully three-dimensional and interactive visualization of large scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data. The user specifies a ROI in the CAVE room by a three-dimensional “mouse-drag”. The data in the specified ROI is automatically extracted from the original CFD data. This ROI procedure can be repeated recursively. The resolution in each ROI is kept approximately constant. A data set of three vector fields and eight scalar fields whose size is about 1 GB each was successfully analyzed.