Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 227, 1817-1829 (2019)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2019-800167-5

Regular Article

MegaMol – a comprehensive prototyping framework for visualizations

¹ Visualization Research Center, University of Stuttgart, Allmandring 19, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
² Big Data Visual Analytics in Life Sciences, University of Tübingen, Sand 14, 72076 Tübingen, Germany

^a email: patrick.gralka@visus.uni-stuttgart.de

Received: 4 October 2018
Received in final form: 3 December 2018
Published online: 8 March 2019

Abstract

We present MegaMol, a low-overhead prototyping framework for interactive visualization of large scientific data sets. We give a brief summary of related work for context and then focus on a comprehensive overview of the core architecture of the framework. This is followed by the existing and novel features and techniques in MegaMol that define its current functionality. MegaMol has originally been developed to support the visualization and analysis of particle-based data sets that, for instance, come from molecular dynamics simulations. Meanwhile, the software has evolved beyond that. New algorithms and techniques have been implemented to handle many diverse tasks, including information visualization. Additionally, improvements have been made on the software engineering side to make MegaMol more accessible for domain scientists, like an easy-to-handle scripting interface.