An approach of flow simulation in virtual reality

The flow simulation in virtual reality can make invisible flow phenomena existing in nature visible in three-dimension scene. It can aid researchers to observe, comprehend and analyze the natural phenomena. The architecture based-VR presented in this paper has been designed to make flow simulation easy and universal. A spatial class hierarchy is proposed to extract the abstract objects from flow phenomena and construct various models such as flow field, streamline, etc. We also introduce the functions of data integration, pre-processing and flow track during the modeling process. Furthermore, we present a concrete example to demonstrate the application of the proposed method to groundwater simulation for Beijing, China. The result of flow simulation in VR can allow researchers to walk into the model, as well as help decision-making in the investigation, forecasting and management of natural resource.