Stereo animation for very large data bases: Case study - meteorology.

As technological advances give rise to increasingly more powerful computers, applied mathematicians are enabled to develop models to simulate phenomena of considerable complexity. One of the problems is how to transform the voluminous output data from a numerical form to a visual one, which is easy to comprehend by humans. This paper analyses a case study from the field of meteorology. We describe a system that we developed for displaying complex data sets using a combination of stereo anaglyphs and animation, and we offer our rationale for selecting this implementation. Some novel techniques were developed to add realism to the animation sequences. The meteorologists who viewed the results of our experiments were able to get a deeper appreciation for the simulated weather episodes and to discover new relationships in the models' output data. The value of our approach lies in the fact that the techniques that we developed for representing four-dimensional data sets can be easily extended to models in other disciplines.