Methods for the interactive analysis and playback of large body simulations

Simulations, such as n-body or smoothed particle hydrodynamics, create large amounts of time variant data that can generally only be visualized non-interactively by rendering the resulting interaction into movies from a fixed viewpoint. This is due to the large amount of unstructured data that make these data incapable of either loading into graphics memory or streaming from disk. The presented approach aims to preserve the interactively navigable 3D structure of the underlying data by reordering and compressing the data in such a way as to optimize playback rates. Additionally, the presented method is able to detect and describe coherent group motion between frames which might be used for analysis.