The simulation and data visualization potential of Microsoft's XNA

Data visualization and simulation visualization is a well studied and ever changing field. Video game engines provide much of what is required for visualization, and also have extra functionality that can be harnessed for simulation. The problem that we are addressing is, can XNA expedite visualization development and also support nontrivial simulations. We intend to address this problem by observing if XNA can be used to create simple visualization, and then incrementally move toward difficult simulations and visualization problems. We intend to show that Microsoft's XNA game engine can create visualizations quickly and run simulations.