FlowVisual: A Visualization App for Teaching and Understanding 3D Flow Field Concepts
Man Wang, Jun Tao, Jun Ma, Yang Shen, Chaoli Wang · Electronic Imaging · 2016
The study of fluid behaviors has been a challenging topic. Flow visualization enables us to visually acquire qualitative and quantitative flow information. There exist various software tools performing different flow visualization tasks. However, we lack tools that help students learn important flow field concepts. In this paper, we present a visualization app, named FlowVisual which runs on iOS devices, to illustrate basic flow field concepts in 3D. In order to meet a comprehensive learning goal for students, we integrate a number of techniques into FlowVisual design, including field-line tracing, field-line comparison, critical point detection and classification, template-based seeding, and surface visualization. We evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of FlowVisual by conducting a formal user study including an introduction and training session, an auto-grading test, and a post-questionnaire survey.