Why stereo virtual reality?
Our laboratory (like many others) has a compelling interest in clear ways of visualizing scientific data. Modern observational networks in generate huge volumes of oceanographic data; numerical models generate even larger blocks of numbers (whether this output should be called data is a separate topic). How to visualize these enormous files? Two-dimensional plots along horizontal or vertical planes have served oceanographers well in the past but fail to capture many of the subtleties present in three-dimensional data sets. For example, the elevation of the sea surface a simultaneously contain both large and small-scale patterns. If the large-scale patterns have a stronger amplitude and small-scale ones, a simple contour plot of sea surface elevation will obscure the small-scale patterns, since contour levels will reflect the stronger signal. If, on the other hand, we render sea surface elevation as a surface in three-dimensional space, we can see both the large and small-scale signals
