Open-source tools for immersive environmental visualization

Scientists of the Desert Research Institute's atmospheric, hydrological, and earth and ecosystem science divisions sift through vast amounts of data gathered from sophisticated instrumentation and computational models. To help address the data analysis needs that stem from the growing volume of data, DRI established the Center for Advanced Visualization, Computation, and Modeling (CAVCaM) to foster DRI's move into interactive, large-scale, 3D visualization of these and other environmental research issues. The authors' mission is two-pronged. First, they seek to partner with their researcher collaborators at DRI and the larger scientific communities through the development and use of better visualization tools. Second, they work with research sponsors to create visualization applications for training and simulation. To best achieve these goals, their underlying philosophy is to use established standards and generic tools (ideally open source) and contribute back to the opensource community. © 2007 IEEE.