Patent ID: 8736600

Claim:
A method for imaging a three-dimensional volume of geometrically irregular grid data representing a grid volume, comprising: selecting a grid probe within the grid volume, the grid probe defined by a bounding box in a sampling domain, the grid volume comprising multiple cells and the grid data comprising a normal vector and a geometry for each face of each cell, split flag data for each cell, an attribute for each cell and an attribute data value for each cell wherein the split flag data comprises data representing each face of a respective cell and its position relative to a face of another cell; mapping extents of the bounding box from the sampling domain to an index domain; rendering an image of the grid probe within the grid volume using a computer processor, the image comprising the grid data only within at least a portion of the extents of the bounding box; and repeating the rendering step in response to movement of the grid probe within the grid volume so that as the grid probe moves, the image of the grid probe is redrawn at a rate sufficiently fast to be perceived as moving in real-time.