Vis5d+

Vis5d+ is a software system for interactive visualization of large 5D gridded data sets (three space dimensions, one time dimension, and a dimension for enumerating multiple physical variables) such as those produced by numerical models in the atmospheric sciences. Vis5d+ can display isosurfaces, contours, colored slices, and volume renderings of time-varying data on a three-dimensional grid, with or without map, elevation, or bathymetry data. Vis5D+ can produce real-time data animation. The Vis5D+ package has tools for managing data grids and conversion of time-varying, 3D data sets into Vis5D format.

NCAR staff developed extensions to the original package, Vis5D, to address the needs of NCAR science. These extensions and others developed elsewhere have been incorporated into Vis5d+, which is maintained as a SourceForge project. Vis5d+ was released as Open Source software to all researchers interested in using virtual reality techniques to study complex phenomena in the atmosphere. It provides an effective data exploration tool that incorporates stereo/3D virtual capability, very large file support, and output of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) and other scene description languages.