# Is there any simple example for volumetric data except from physics and medicine?

Recently I heard about the term volumetric data. The definition for volumetric data is as follows

#1: Definition

Volumetric data is typically a set S of samples $$(x, y, z, v)$$, representing the value v of some property of the data, at a 3D location $$(x, y, z)$$. If the value is simply a 0 or a 1, with a value of 0 indicating background and a value of 1 indicating the object, then the data is referred to as binary data. The data may instead be multivalued, with the value representing some measurable property of the data, including, for example, color, density, heat, or pressure.

A volumetric dataset consists of information at sample locations in some space. The information may be a scalar (such as density in a computed tomography (CT) scan), a vector (such as velocity in a flow field), or a higher-order tensor (such as energy, density, and momentum in computational fluid dynamics (CFD)). The space is usually 3D, consisting of either three spatial dimensions or another combination of spatial and frequency dimensions.

In simple words, I can say that volumetric data is nothing but a three-dimensional collection of tensors.

The articles linked above contain some examples of volumetric data in the medical (and probably physics) domain.

Are there any other simple real-world examples for volumetric data other than the medical and physics domain and physics?

• "Physics" is quite broad... That eliminates several engineering applications I can think of. However, you mention medicine, where it's mostly used by biophysicists, so by physics, do you mean pure/theoretical physics? Nov 21, 2021 at 11:00
• @Avatrin Yeah, I do mean pure/theoretical physics. Nov 21, 2021 at 14:09

Whenever a system is being modelled in three dimensions, you can be sure that tensors either can or are being used. Most of the systems I can think of are either simulated volumetric data, or a combination of real measurements and interpolated values.