Interactive 3D Visualizations of Laser Plasma Experiments on the Web and in VR

Abstract

Lasers play essential role in many areas of both fundamental as well as applied research. Experiments in plasma physics that study complex interactions of intense laser beams with various forms of targets rely heavily not only on theory, but also on physics simulations. Such simulations, computed on a several thousand CPU core cluster, often trace the behaviour of billions of charged elementary particles over hundreds of time steps, generating up to terabytes of data. Visualization of the data is a challenging process that is mostly performed on GPU clusters using software such as ParaView [Aya15]. While this workflow has many advantages and provides advanced features for visualization and interpretation of the raw data, it is limited in the dissemination of the results on the web in interactive and VR mode. Our approach at ELI Beamlines, a European laser research facility near Prague, uses our web-based interactive 3D visualization framework for exploration of curated and optimized simulation datasets. This application, while still in early stage of development, runs in a regular web browser and utilizes VR mode to offer scientists completely new point of view of their simulations. Based on in-house developed WebGL 2.0 implementation, the framework not only renders the dataset on the GPU in real-time at 60fps, but also provides orthogonal views, textual and numeric information, alongside a GUI containing timeline animation controls and layer visibility management, with additional graphical elements based on D3.js for plotting animated graphs and legends.