The purpose of the project is to detect hairpin vortices, which are the areas where vortices shaped in a horseshoe formation make a loop from the surface of a wind tunnel. In between the rotating vortice legs there are areas of low Reynold's Shear Stress and low vorticity. The aerospace people were interested in the visualization of these structures to better understand how the structures are created and act.

After initially reading several papers on the vortices formed over the surface, I spent some time going over the current version of the code used to visualize the structures. I also familiarized myself with MUI, an OpenGL toolkit for making menus in C. Having used OpenGL in a previous graphics class I gravitated towards designing the user interface for the program. I added colorization options as well as providing a way for the user to determine what measurements they want to display. By increasing and defining the number of operations the program can perform, the user can zero in on a particular measurement or feature of the dataset(s).