The Visualization Toolkit

From Success Stories in Scientific Visualization Wiki

In 1993 three visualization researchers from GE Corporate R&D Center began to develop an open source visualization system. This system, which came to be known as the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), was initially envisioned as a teaching and research collaboration tool (hence its release under open source license). The software gained rapid acceptance, in part due to the sophistication of its objectoriented design and software process, but also because of the community of users that formed around it. VTK is now in world-wide usage, and has helped spawn several small companies and derivative products. For example, Kitware Inc. was formed in 1998 to support VTK, subsequently creating products based on the toolkit including the open source ParaView parallel visualization system and the proprietary volume rendering application VolView. VTK continues to evolve with contributions from researchers in academia, the US National Labs, and businesses, and is used in dozens of commercial software applications. The left figure uses the LOx Post dataset, which simulates the flow of liquid oxygen across a flat plate with a cylindrical post perpendicular to the flow. This analysis models the flow in a rocket engine, where the post promotes mixing of the liquid oxygen. The middle figure demonstrates CFD visualization using ParaView (middle), while the right figure demonstrates volume rendering using VolView.

W.J. Schroeder, K. Martin, and W. Lorensen, "The Visualization Toolkit: An Object Oriented Approach to Computer Graphics," Third Edition, Kitware, Inc., ISBN-1-930934-12-2 (2004).

S. E. Rogers, D. Kwak, and U. K. Kaul, "A numerical study of three-dimensional incompressible flow around multiple post. In Proceedings of AIAA Aerospace Sciences Conference." AIAA Paper 86-0353. Reno, Nevada, 1986.