Discussion

We present a new technique for the visualization of dynamical systems, namely the use of a thread of streamlets for characteristic trajectories. This is useful, since a trade-off is made between only displaying structural information as, e.g., critical points and separatrices, and directly visualizing the system dynamics by the use of stream lines or stream surfaces. As an abstract denotation of the dynamics caused by a dynamical system is very hard to understand for most users, enhancing this information by locally adding cues of direct visualization helps to communicate the crucial aspects of the system behavior.

Contrary to surface-based stream line visualization techniques like the stream tube of sweep-based trajectory representations, threads of streamlets visualize the flow continuously in the vicinity of a stream line. Using a thread of streamlets instead of entirely populating 3D phase space with stream lines, has the advantage of reducing occlusion. Although quite a number of papers deal with densely visualizing flow in three-space, it seems to be necessary to place visual cues selectively to reduce occlusion problems.

mailto:helwig@cg.tuwien.ac.at.