Interactive tracing of radio waves and neuronal fiber pathways for exploratory visualization in virtual reality

• Interaktives Verfolgen von Funkwellen und neuronalen Faserbahnen zur explorativen Visualisierung in der virtuellen Realität

Rick, Tobias; Kuhlen, Torsten (Thesis advisor)

Aachen : Publikationsserver der RWTH Aachen University (2012)
Dissertation / PhD Thesis

Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2012

Abstract

Exploratory visualization of physical simulations in virtual environments greatly benefits from interactively changing parameters with real-time feedback. The present thesis addresses two specific research questions by problem reformulation and implementation on the Graphics Processing Unit's many-core architecture towards a simulation and interaction in real-time: (1) simulating and manipulating wireless radio networks and (2) estimating and disambiguating neuronal fiber connectivity in the living human brain. This works assists in the exploratory scientific analysis by directly coupling simulation input and output with visual feedback and natural interaction via an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) interface. The user becomes an integral part of the workflow in order to observe computation results in real-time and to react appropriately. An interactive manipulation is enabled by decomposing and reformulating the domain specific algorithms into parallel sub tasks. Their scalability is demonstrated in the presence of a huge number of cores as available on current graphics hardware. This work uses VR interfaces to put the user in more control of the computing pipeline in order to exploit the full potential of a human-in-the-loop to see patterns and structures arise.