When starting in a new field of research the question of where to embed the test implementation is very important. Especially in the field of visualization this question is crucial, since implementing the whole visualization pipeline [60] is clearly not practicable or desirable in most situations. In the case of this thesis it was decided to implement and test new visualization techniques in the field of three-dimensional dynamical systems on the basis of AVS [2].
AVS is a general-purpose environment for developing and compositing visualization techniques. Applications are thereby realized as a set of modules (elementary tasks in the visualization process), which are connected to form a data-flow network by associating output and input ports of consecutive modules.
AVS modules contain easy to specify user-interface components. Apart
from a large set of predefined modules [3], user
defined modules may
be implemented. As long as the data of a user-defined
module, which is handed over to AVS, conforms to standard AVS
data structures, these modules can be easily combined with already
existing ones. The availability of many
visualization techniques within AVS led us to choose AVS as the
basis for DynSys3D.