EDM Studio Inc.

The massive tsunami that impacted South East Asia in December 2004 is an extreme example of the effect of water inundation upon the built environment. An understanding of such natural hazards is critical to ameliorating their effect on people, their homes and possessions. To simulate the behaviour of water flow, Geoscience Australia and the Australian National University are developing an open-source software modeling tool for hydrodynamic simulations.

At the heart of the software is a fluid dynamics module for solving the so-called Shallow Water Wave equation. Visualization has played a major role in the success of this project, from early experiments where it was essential in the detection of numerical and programming errors, to the presentation of results where it provides researchers and stakeholders with a vivid depiction of the simulated water flow.

EDM Studio partner and Australian National University Vizlab staffer Darran Edmundson was commissioned by Geoscience Australia to write an interactive 3D viewer capable of visualizing the results of ANU-GA simulations. The resulting software package, Swollen, uses the OpenSceneGraph toolkit to provide Geoscience Australia researchers with the ability to interactively spin, translate, record and playback high-quality visualizations of their simulations.