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Visualization of vector fields plays an important role in research activities nowadays. Increasing web applications allow a fast, multi-platform and multi-device access to data. As a result, web applications must be optimized in order to be performed heterogeneously as well as on high-performance as on low capacity devices. This paper presents a hardware-accelerated scheme for integration-based flow visualization techniques, based on a hierarchical integration procedure which reduces the computational effort of the algorithm from linear to logarithmic, compared to serial integration methodologies. The contribution relies on the fact that the optimization is only implemented using the graphics application programming interface (API), instead of requiring additional APIs or plug-ins. This is achieved by using images as data storing elements instead of graphical information matrices. A case study in oceanic currents is implemented.

Visualization of vector fields plays an important role in research activities nowadays. Web applications allow a fast, multi-platform and multi-device access to data, which results in the need of optimized applications to be implemented in both high and low-performance devices. The computation of trajectories usually repeats calculations due to the fact that several points might lie over the same trajectory. This paper presents a new methodology to calculate point trajectories over a highly-dense and uniformly-distributed grid of points in which the trajectories are forced to lie over the points in the grid. Its advantages rely on a highly parallel computing implementation and in the reduction of the computational effort to calculate the stream paths since unnecessary calculations are avoided by reusing data through iterations. As case study, the visualization of oceanic streams in the web platform is presented and analyzed, using WebGL as the parallel computing architecture and the rendering engine.