Abstract
Understanding vector fields is important in many science and engineering domains. Often glyphs are used to represent vector data as arrows, cones, ellipsoids, and other geometric shapes. When implemented using traditional 3D graphics, these glyphs have drawbacks of being view dependent, orientation ambiguous, and requiring specific geometric resolution. We propose a straightforward new method of procedural dipole texturing of glyph shapes, which overcomes these drawbacks and can enhance existing methods. We demonstrate our method with an interactive application (GlyphSea), which incorporates additional features such as screen space ambient occlusion, glyph displacement, lattices, halos and other contextual visual cues. We also discuss the results and informal feedback from scientists on insights gained by exploring time varying vector datasets in astrophysics and seismology. © 2014 SPIE-IS&T.