Interactive Simulation Data Exploration in Virtual Environments

In the last few years, simulation of technical and physical processes has become an important pillar in engineering. Computational Engineering Science (CES) is nowadays an indispensable and essential tool for the development of, e.g., airplanes, cars, combustion engines, turbines etc. In this work, we present a framework that tackles the growing complexity of these simulations. For simulations of highly complex processes, we enable interactive exploration in 3D space by application of Virtual Reality (VR) technology. For simulation data that is only a part of a complete process simulation, we propose methods that facilitate data analysis within the global context of an interdisciplinary project. By considering a single simulation as well as its part in a larger context, this framework enables engineers to explore their data on multiple scales of complexity.