Glyph based representation of principal stress tensors in virtual reality environments

This article describes a new visualization method for an illustrative visualization of physical values in immersive workspaces. Through the newly developed visualization pipeline, FEM results such as stress, temperature and resulting deformation, as well as the underlying constraints can be visualized in virtual and augmented reality (AR) applications. Special features are the use of 3D glyphs for mapping stress direction and gradient as well as data preparation and the resulting data format, which was especially developed for use with virtual reality (VR) systems. This article demonstrates the current state of VR developments, which were done at the Institute for Machine Tools and Production Processes, for improving the analysis of complex FE datasets, and gives an outlook to future research activities.