Webbased Dynamic and Interactive Environmental Visualization.pdfVIP

Web-based Dynamic and Interactive Environmental Visualization Bo Huang Department of Civil Engineering National University of Singapore 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260 Tel: (65)6874-2158 Fax: (65)6779-1635 E-mail: cvehb@.sg Abstract The development of novel interactive visualizations can substantially contribute to environmental modeling and understanding of complex environmental processes. To allow the Web Map Service (WMS) to support this, this paper explores a generic framework in which a dynamic environmental modeling process can be interactively visualized, controlled and tuned on the Internet by using Java 3D-based hybrid Internet computation through the simulation steering technique. A hydrological model, TOPMODEL, is employed to illustrate the simulation of a rainfall-run off process within a computational and steering environment. This environment allows users to visually interact and experiment with environmental model computation, thereby facilitating the exploration of process-based environmental applications. Keywords : Environmental visualization; Dynamic and interactive visualization; Simulation steering; Internet; TOPMODEL; Java 3D; Applet-servlet. 1. Introduction Computer graphics revolutionises the way data are interacted with, presented, understood and used in a variety of application areas, which includes environmental planning and management. Using visualization tools to assist in understanding of complex environmental data has aroused considerable interest (Rhyne et al., 1993; Bishop an