SiPaViS - A toolkit for scientific visualization and simulation

This paper introduces a new approach for scientific visualization and simulation based on a particle system. The main characteristics of the toolkit we designed and implemented at the New University of Lisbon are presented. Along with particles, fields, and particle sources, the central concept of the framework introduces the interaction as the fourth primary class of objects. The result is that a large diversity of techniques for data visualization and simulation can easily be integrated. A user of the toolkit can write a relatively short script in order to build a specific application program. This script is interpreted by SiPaViS (the name of this toolkit) according to the rules of a given grammar and on the basis of the existent re-usable classes. However, a programmer can always extend the set of predefined classes by writing the corresponding code in a common programming language. Some examples are given in the paper under the scope of application areas such as volume rendering through ray-casting implementation and also visualization of vector fields.