Turbulence—How Your
Game Play
Helps Us

RIV Elimination

In the game, we need your help finding the “biggest” Region of Intense Vorticity in each snapshot of the simulation. But by “big”, we mean the one that will hold the largest sphere. As there can be a several hundred RIVs, we need an efficient way to quickly eliminate the smaller RIVs.

How are RIV’s eliminated? Well, we have created something fun and helpful called the Bounding Box, or BBox for short.

Every RIV in the whole game is given a BBox and they look like this (yellow):

So how do BBoxes help us eliminate RIVs?

Well, let’s go back to the goal that in each time slice, we are looking for the place inside an RIV which fits the largest sphere, like in the pictures below.

This means eliminating all the other RIVs that can only fit small spheres. In the game, smaller RIVs are automatically eliminated as soon you find an RIV that will hold a sphere of diameter larger than longest edge of the bounding box of those smaller RIVs (in the same time slice).

So the bigger the sphere you find, the more RIVs will be instantly eliminated!