Personal visualization system: applications in research and engineering

The authors describe an innovative personal visualization system and its application to several research and engineering problems. The system bridges both hardware and software components to permit a user to graphically describe a visualization problem to the computer; thereby reducing program development time to a few hours. Low-cost visualization is achieved using PC-based software that can either be executed on a PC or drive graphic workstations for high-resolution displays. In either case, supercomputer computation rates are available for the visualization process. On PCs this is done with one or more PiP plug in cards, each of which is capable of 100 million floating point operations per second. On workstations this is done with the QUEN array processor. Applications mentioned include: ocean wave imaging; characterizing superconductors; and solar sail visualization