Interactive Adaptive Mesh Refinement in the CAVE

The Argonne CAVE represents a unique way to interact with a three-dimensional simulation. We have created an interactive adaptive mesh model for the cave. In the image below, the ten foot cube comprising the cave is represented by the box. An elastic sphere with triangular holes is being modeled. The head of person wearing the tracker is shown by the red sphere with the coal eyes. The wand, represented by the yellow sphere can be used to apply a force vector to the model. In this image, one such force vector is represented by the red arrow on the right. When the desired forces have been applied, the person in the cave presses a button on the wand and these forces are communicated to a separate process (perhaps on the SP1) which uses our adaptive mesh techniques and linear solver to compute a solution. Once computed, this solution is communicated back to the CAVE process which displays the answer. People in the cave can walk through the solution and examine it in detail, or apply different forces.
We feel that the CAVE represents an excellent way to interact with three-dimensional models that has been impossible up to the present. We plan to incorporate our future work on three-dimensional tetrahedral representations into the cave---this graphical representation will give users the most natural way yet available to interact and view these representations. Click here for a different view of this CAVE simulation.

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freitag@mcs.anl.gov / jones@cs.utk.edu / plassman@mcs.anl.gov
Argonne National Laboratory / The University of Tennessee