Well, I’ve been working on my submission for the IEEE Visualization 05 Contest. I chose the New Orleans windfield dataset. The theme for this years contest is “Rendering Revolution”, so I decided to write a custom app that could run on virtually any hardware interactively, and build it totally from Open Source tools. So, 2 weeks of Dev C++ and Gimp for Windows later, it’s all done.

It was alot of fun to work on. I had to dig up some skills I hadn’t used in a long time, and learn a few new ones. Namely:

  • Runge Kutta 2nd Order – hadn’t done this since college, took a while to remember it all
  • Marching Tetrahedra – never did this at all!
  • Localizing within tetrahedra – Lucked out here and found a neat method for determining if a point was within a 4-sided tetrahedra.

As much fun as it was to develop, it felt kinda funny writing up the submission. One of the tasks was to determine the effect of a pollutant’s release at various points. Felt kinda strange to be releasing “pollutants” and seeing how far they can spread, especially given some of the stuff on the news lately.

You can see the full submission here. Tell me what ya think :)

Update: August 2nd, 2005, 7pm

Just got an email from the contest committee.. Evidently, participation in the contest was so nonexistant that they’ve extended the deadline by 30 days in hopes of getting some more entries. Of course, they waited until the day after the original deadline to announce it. So it looks like all the hard work that myself and the other entries put forth to get ours in on time was for naught, as everyone else gets an extra 30 days. Will I revisit my entry to improve it? Would it matter if I did? I don’t know….

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