3D Volume Visualization of Environmental Data in the Web

Overview & Synopsis

The environmental community has an increasing need for visualizations because of the rapidly growing amount of data gathered from various sources e.g. sensors, users and apps. This paper presents a complex visualization for the Web that can be used to get insight into 3D volume data. Volumes like air, lakes and seas are often visualized using 2D slices or one dimensional diagrams that display measured values in a specific point of the volume. To get new insight the 3D volume has to be visualized in 3D. A technique called ray marching, which is known in the computer graphics field in combination with modern web technologies, can be used to create such visualizations for the Web. In addition to the new visualization, this paper also presents the usage of such complex software in a visualization framework created in the same research team. This framework hides the complexity behind user friendly web interfaces that allows one to configure the 3D volume visualization without any programming skills.