Before, they were just taking a cross-section of a few selected data sets. To see the animations running at 24 frames per second also brings insight into the dynamic nature of the problem. Also, it is much easier to show nonexperts what you are talking about when you show these visualizations. This is the basic configuration of the NRL's virtual reality setup. The Origin 2000 supercomputer is used to run and solve numerical simulations.
Magnetic trackers detect the position and orientation of the user's head and joystick.
This information is used to provide the right perspective and to navigate through the virtual environment. For some cases, we use commercially available products. However, these products are not geared for very large data sets and they cannot handle data sets larger than a few Mb. So, in-house, we had to develop new visualization techniques and new software to be able to cope with these data sets. In the example mentioned before, for example, the data was produced using a novel tree structure called the Fully Threaded Tree.