Firefly provides interactive exploration of particle-based data in the browser. The user can filter, display vector fields, and toggle the visibility of their customizable datasets all on-the-fly. Different Firefly visualizations, complete with preconfigured data and camera view-settings, can be shared by URL. As Firefly is written in WebGL, it can be hosted online, though Firefly can also be used locally, without an internet connection. Firefly was developed with simulations of galaxy formation in mind but is flexible enough to display any particle-based data. Other features include a stereoscopic 3D picture mode and mobile compatibility.

FIRE Studio is a Python interface for C libraries that project Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) datasets. These C libraries can, in principle, be applied to any SPH dataset; the Python interface is specialized to conveniently load and format Gadget-derivative datasets such as GIZMO (ascl:1410.003). FIRE Studio is fast, memory efficient, and parallelizable. In addition to producing "1-color" projection maps for SPH datasets, the interface can produce "2-color" maps, where the pixel saturation is set by one projected quantity and the hue is set by another, and "3-color" maps, where three quantities are projected simultaneously and remapped into an RGB colorspace. FIRE Studio can model stellar emission and dust extinction to produce mock Hubble images (by default) or to model surface brightness maps for thirteen of the most common bands (plus the bolometric luminosity). It produces publication quality static images of simulation datasets and provides interpolation scripts to create movies that smoothly evolve in time (provided multiple snapshots in time of the data exist), view the dataset from different perspectives (taking advantage of shared memory buffers to allow massive parallelization), or both.