Maintenance of a front of particles, an efficient method of generating a set of sample points over a two-dimensional stream surface, is described. The particles are repeatedly advanced a short distance through the flow field. New polygons are appended to the downstream edge of the surface. The spacing of the particles is adjusted to maintain an adequate sampling across the width of the growing surface. Curve and ribbon methods of vector field visualization are reviewed.>

It is suggested that many existing platforms over emphasize ease-of-use and do not adequately address issues of extensibility. A visualization testbed, called SuperGlue, which is particularly suited for the rapid development of new visualization methods, was built. An interpreter supports rapid development of new code, and an extensive class hierarchy encourages code reuse. By explicitly designing for ease of programming, it was possible to produce a visualization system which is powerful, easy to use, and rapidly improving. The motivation of the work, the architecture of the system, and plans for further development are reported.>

We present two algorithms for the display of CSG-defined objects on Pixel-Powers, an extension of the Pixel-Planes logic-enhanced memory architecture, which calculates for each and every pixel on the screen (in parallel) the value of any quadratic function in the screen coordinates (x,y). The first algorithm restructures any CSG tree into an equivalent, but possibly larger, tree whose display can be achieved by the second algorithm. The second algorithm traverses the restructured tree and generates quadratic coefficients and opcodes for Pixel-Powers. These opcodes instruct Pixel-Powers to generate the boundaries of primitives and perform set operations using the standard Z-buffer algorithm.Several externally-supplied CSG data sets have been processed with the new tree-traversal algorithm and an associated Pixel-Powers simulator. The resulting images indicate that good results can be obtained very rapidly with the new system. For example, the commonly used MBB test part (at right) with 24 primitives is translated into approximately 1900 quadratic equations. On a Pixel-Powers system running at 10MHz (the speed at which our current Pixel-Planes memories run), the image should be rendered in about 7.5 milliseconds.

Pixel-planes is a logic-enhanced memory system for raster graphics and imaging. Although each pixel-memory is enhanced with a one-bit ALU, the system's real power comes from a tree of one-bit adders that can evaluate linear expressions Ax+By+C for every pixel (x,y) simultaneously, as fast as the ALUs and the memory circuits can accept the results. We and others have begun to develop a variety of algorithms that exploit this fast linear expression evaluation capability. In this paper we report some of those results. Illustrated in this paper is a sample image from a small working prototype of the Pixel-planes hardware and a variety of images from simulations of a full-scale system. Timing estimates indicate that 30,000 smooth shaded triangles can be generated per second, or 21,000 smooth-shaded and shadowed triangles can be generated per second, or over 25,000 shaded spheres can be generated per second. Image-enhancement by adaptive histogram equalization can be performed within 4 seconds on a 512x512 image.