Tensor splats

A new general-purpose technique for the visualization of time-dependent symmetric positive definite tensor fields of rank two is described. It is based on a splatting technique that is built from tiny transparent glyph primitives which are capable of incorporating the full orientational information content of a tensor. The result is an information-rich image that allows to read off the preferred orientations in a tensor field. It is useful for analyzing slices or volumes of a three-dimensional tensor field and can be overlaid with standard volume rendering or color mapping. The application of the rendering technique is demonstrated on numerically simulated general relativistic data and a measured diffusion tensor field of a human brain.