In computational fluid dynamics (CFD), visualization is a frequently used tool for data evaluation and qualitative comparison to flow visualizations originating from experiments; moreover, the visualization of three-dimensional
fluid flows can be a very important teaching instrument.
In particular, it has been proved that streaklines and timelines are effective visualization techniques for depicting time-dependent phenomena such as vortical flows (vortex shedding, vortex breakdown, an so on), moving shock
waves and turbulent flows. Often, the visualization of unsteady flows requires a high computational power available only by using high-end workstations.
In this paper we present a platform-independent software for particle tracing by pathlines, streaklines, and timelines which can be used in an interactive way on entry level computers; moreover, we propose an innovative texture-based visualization approach we called TOSL (Thick Oriented Streamline).

Keywords: scientific visualization, flow visualization, vector field visualization.