Section: New Results

Visualizing $2D$ Flows with Animated Arrow Plots

Participants : Bruno Jobard, Nicolas Ray, Dmitry Sokolov.

Flow fields are often represented as a set of static arrows in illustration of scientific vulgarization, documentary, meteorology, etc. This simple and schematic representation lets an observer intuitively interpret the main properties of a flow: its orientation and velocity magnitude (Figure 5 ).

We have investigated how to automatically generate dynamic versions of such representations for $2D$ unsteady flow fields. As a result, we designed an algorithm able to smoothly animate arrows along the flow while controlling their density in the domain over time. Beside keeping an even distribution of arrows over time, we made significant efforts to remove disturbing rendering artefacts such as the apparition of a new arrow, the removing of existing arrows, and the representation of field where the velocity is null. This work has been published as a research report, [24] .

Figure 5. Ocean currents visualized with a set of dynamic arrows. The Close-up shows the arrow trajectories and the morphing of their glyphs.