AbstractsComputer Science

The work described in this thesis is part of the Open Space project, a collaboration between Linköping University, NASA and the American Museum of Natural History. The long-term goal of Open Space is a multi-purpose, open-source scientific visualization software. The thesis covers the research and implementation of a pipeline for preparing and rendering volumetric data. The developed pipeline consists of three stages: A data formatting stage which takes data from various sources and prepares it for the rest of the pipeline, a pre-processing stage which builds a tree structure of of the raw data, and finally an interactive rendering stage which draws a volume using ray-casting. The pipeline is a fully working proof-of-concept for future development of Open Space, and can be used as-is to render space weather data using a combination of suitable data structures and an efficient data transfer pipeline. Many concepts and ideas from this work can be utilized in the larger-scale software project.