It doesn't take a rocket scientist to build a computer game, but rocket scientists, along with biologists, chemists, physicists, and every other professional who develops and applies visualization technology for scientific inquiry and discovery, have a lot to learn from computer game developers. They also have a lot to teach them. Increasingly, the technology gap separating scientific visualization and gaming is being bridged by revolutionary advances in computer graphics hardware and software driven by the needs of both camps. Where scientists once ran their high-end simulations and visualizations on supercomputers and expensive graphics workstations, today they're churning out volumes of visual data on the same low-cost PCs equipped with high performance graphics hardware that the game community relies on. They are also incorporating novel optimization techniques driven primarily by the needs of the gaming community for achieving real-time interaction with their large scientific datasets.
展开▼
