At the beginning of many scientific visualization projects it is necessary to first program a suitable rendering engine. This often results in very good, but only project-specific solutions, which are often no longer used afterwards.
In 2006 a group of researchers at VRVis started to build the framework Aardvark, because they wanted to find more than just one-way solutions and not to let all these codes and tools, which were developed in the context of research projects, disappear into a drawer. Since then, they have been collecting all the solutions they have developed over the years for interactive high-performance visualizations in this framework, thus allowing the platform to grow with each new project by adding further libraries and repositories.
Today, the Aardvark platform, which is now open-source and open to the graphics community around the world via Github, includes over 25 repositories. These provide sophisticated building blocks for applications: from maximum hardware utilization, simulation with and visualization of extremely large amounts of data, which can be processed up to 100 times faster with Aardvark than with standard tools, to user interfaces with an incremental approach. Aardvark is now in use and offers algorithms and procedures for use as reconstruction and modeling tool, in physically accurate real-time lighting design, and for conventional visualization of infrastructure projects or planetary scans from NASA missions. Also industrial products, such as the reality capturing software "3DWorx" from rmDATA, which derives relevant geometries from huge laser scan data and thus significantly shortens the path to the 3D model, rely on Aardvark technology.
Due to the active cooperation of several VRVis researchers at Aardvark, from which the start-up Aardworx emerged, as well as an international community of about 100 people, the platform is always up to date with recent software and hardware developments. Recently the release of Aardvark 5 has just taken place, on which the core developers of the research group Geospatial Visualization, Semantic Modelling and Acquisition have been working intensively in the last months.
Furthermore, the Aardvark library "incremental" was revised and officially included in the F# ecosystem with the support of Don Syme, one of the lead developers of the F# programming language and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. This not only extends Aardvark's reach, but also shows how the company's own research work can be used to help develop programming languages and communities. Thus the work of the VRVis researchers has now become one of the driving forces of the international F# community and shows how domestic research work contributes to top-level research worldwide and positions Austria as a leading technology and innovation hub.
Visual Analysis of Asteroid Deflection.
In this project tools and methods for handling, administration, manipulation and evaluation of several different data sources for measurements and lighting design are developed.
Digital representations of the real world and digital twins are becoming increasingly important for planning, situation assessment and decision-making.
High-quality lighting simulation requires dynamic, interactive, realistic real-time lighting simulation for various complex architectural environments.
Visual Analytics for Modeling and Simulation: Improvement of simulation setup and design scenarios with tools and methods of Visual Analytics.
