DV3D: 3D Climate data visualization using python and VTK

DV3D is a python-based application for 3-D visualization of climate datasets developed at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation in consultation with scientists at NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. Its simple GUI interface is designed to be readily used by busy scientists who have little time to invest in learning complex new frameworks. The application builds on VTK, an open-source, object-oriented library, for visualization and analysis. VTK currently has over a million lines of code and is a de facto standard for the academic, industry, and research visualization communities. DV3D utilizes VTK through MayaVi2, a general purpose, python-based tool for 3-D scientific data visualization. DV3D provides the high-level interfaces, tools, and application integrations required to make the analysis and visualization power of VTK readily accessible to scientists. It can run as a desktop application or distributed over a set of nodes for hyperwall or distributed visualization applications.

DV3D's features include:

• multiple visualization modes, including volume rendering, 2-D slicing, iso-contouring, and streamlining.
• a simple GUI interface which hides the complexity of 3-D visualization while exposing the analysis and visualization operations most requested by climate scientists.
• an embedded Grads (and soon CDAT) shell to integrate analysis and visualization.
• multiple simultaneous synchronized visualization displays.
• a configuration manager which facilitates saving and restoring multiple visualization configurations.
• a hyperwall mode which features a separate synchronized visualization display on each hyperwall tile.
• hyperwall application development on the user's desktop.
• active and passive stereo vision support.
• mlab scripting through MayaVi2- a MatLab-like visualization programming language.

This presentation will include an overview and a demo of DV3D's most important features.