Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-41).

When creating physics simulations, one common issue that arises is the need to visualize the simulation progress and results. With recent advancements in ray tracing this problem has mostly been solved for non real-time applications. However, there still exists a need to find and evaluate real-timerendering options for applications that need to run at interactive frame rates. In this thesis, we look at some rendering frameworks and propose a set off our performance based metrics and one usability metric for evaluating these. In addition to the metrics, we propose a qualitative method for evaluating the realism of simulated scenes rendered using different frameworks. Finally, we select one of the frameworks and use the metrics and the qualitative method proposed to evaluate the overall fit of the framework for the use case of visualizing physics simulations. The results show similar scores for the performance metrics using the new framework as using a previously used reference framework while showing a slight tendency for increased realism in scenes using the new framework.

Nowadays by increasing importance of information in all sectors, illustrating data in a communicative format helps decision makers to understand and analyze effectively large amount of information in a short time. Information visualization, as a way of presenting different data types in a more understandable form, is growing increasingly in various areas. This thesis aims to investigate how information visualization could be used to increase readability and usability of transportation simulation data. Most of the previous studies in this area have focused on visualization of transportation infrastructures such as roads, bridges, etc.; while the main focus of this thesis is visualizing the outputs of transportation simulation systems. In order to study the role of information visualization in the transportation systems, we have investigated the visualization applications in a real implemented agent-based transportation simulator called TAPAS as case. In our case study, the visualization related requirements of users were analyzed, and the visualization tool was designed and developed based on the identified requirements.