Visualization (graphics)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Visualization (disambiguation).

finite element analysis

Visualization or visualisation (see spelling differences) is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.

Visualization today has ever-expanding applications in science, education, engineering (e.g., product visualization),

central perspective in the Renaissance period. The development of animation
also helped advance visualization.

Overview

Ptolemy world map, reconstituted from Ptolemy's Geographia (circa 150), indicating the countries of "Serica" and "Sinae" (China) at the extreme right, beyond the island of "Taprobane" (Sri Lanka, oversized) and the "Aurea Chersonesus" (Southeast Asian peninsula
)
Charles Minard's information graphic of Napoleon
's march

The use of visualization to present information is not a new phenomenon. It has been used in maps, scientific drawings, and data plots for over a thousand years. Examples from

Ptolemy's Geographia (2nd century AD), a map of China (1137 AD), and Minard's map (1861) of Napoleon's invasion of Russia a century and a half ago. Most of the concepts learned in devising these images carry over in a straightforward manner to computer visualization. Edward Tufte has written three critically acclaimed books that explain many of these principles.[1][2][3]

Computer graphics has from its beginning been used to study scientific problems. However, in its early days the lack of graphics power often limited its usefulness. The recent emphasis on visualization started in 1987 with the publication of Visualization in Scientific Computing, a special issue of Computer Graphics.[4] Since then, there have been several conferences and workshops, co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and ACM SIGGRAPH, devoted to the general topic, and special areas in the field, for example volume visualization.

Most people are familiar with the digital animations produced to present

computer-generated images that show real spacecraft in action, out in the void far beyond Earth, or on other planets.[citation needed] Dynamic forms of visualization, such as educational animation or timelines
, have the potential to enhance learning about systems that change over time.

Apart from the distinction between interactive visualizations and animation, the most useful categorization is probably between abstract and model-based scientific visualizations. The abstract visualizations show completely conceptual constructs in 2D or 3D. These generated shapes are completely arbitrary. The model-based visualizations either place overlays of data on real or digitally constructed images of reality or make a digital construction of a real object directly from the scientific data.

Scientific visualization is usually done with specialized software, though there are a few exceptions, noted below. Some of these specialized programs have been released as open source software, having very often its origins in universities, within an academic environment where sharing software tools and giving access to the source code is common. There are also many proprietary software packages of scientific visualization tools.

Models and frameworks for building visualizations include the data flow models popularized by systems such as AVS, IRIS Explorer, and VTK toolkit, and data state models in spreadsheet systems such as the Spreadsheet for Visualization and Spreadsheet for Images.

Applications

Scientific visualization

Simulation of a Raleigh–Taylor instability caused by two mixing fluids
Main article: Scientific visualization

As a subject in

reasoning
.
medical visualization, astrophysical visualization, and chemical visualization. There are several different techniques to visualize scientific data, with isosurface reconstruction and direct volume rendering
being the more common.

Data and information visualization

Main article: Data and information visualization
Further information:
Infographics
IPv4

Data visualization is a related subcategory of visualization dealing with

geospatial data (as in thematic cartography) that is abstracted in schematic form.[7]

Information visualization concentrates on the use of computer-supported tools to explore large amount of abstract data. The term "information visualization" was originally coined by the User Interface Research Group at Xerox PARC and included Jock Mackinlay.[

transforming
, and representing abstract data in a form that facilitates human interaction for exploration and understanding. Important aspects of information visualization are dynamics of visual representation and the interactivity. Strong techniques enable the user to modify the visualization in real-time, thus affording unparalleled perception of patterns and structural relations in the abstract data in question.

Educational visualization

Educational visualization is using a

atomic structure
, because atoms are far too small to be studied easily without expensive and difficult to use scientific equipment.

Knowledge visualization

The use of visual representations to transfer knowledge between at least two persons aims to improve the transfer of

perspectives, opinions, and predictions
by using various complementary visualizations. See also: picture dictionary, visual dictionary

Product visualization

Product visualization involves visualization software technology for the viewing and manipulation of 3D models, technical drawing and other related documentation of manufactured components and large assemblies of products. It is a key part of

3-D modeling, rapid prototyping, and simulation. 3D product visualization promises more interactive experiences for online shoppers, but also challenges retailers to overcome hurdles in the production of 3D content, as large-scale 3D content production can be extremely costly and time-consuming.[11]

Visual communication

signs, and electronic resources. Recent research in the field has focused on web design and graphically oriented usability
.

Visual analytics

Visual analytics focuses on human interaction with visualization systems as part of a larger process of data analysis. Visual analytics has been defined as "the science of analytical reasoning supported by the interactive visual interface".[12]

Its focus is on human information discourse (interaction) within massive, dynamically changing information spaces. Visual analytics research concentrates on support for perceptual and cognitive operations that enable users to detect the expected and discover the unexpected in complex information spaces.

Technologies resulting from visual analytics find their application in almost all fields, but are being driven by critical needs (and funding) in biology and national security.

Interactivity

See also:
Interactive data visualization and Interactive whiteboard

Interactive visualization or interactive visualisation is a branch of

graphic visualization in computer science
that involves studying how humans interact with computers to create graphic illustrations of information and how this process can be made more efficient.

For a visualization to be considered interactive it must satisfy two criteria:

  • Human input: control of some aspect of the visual
    representation
    of information, or of the information being represented, must be available to a human, and
  • Response time: changes made by the human must be incorporated into the visualization in a timely manner. In general, interactive visualization is considered a
    soft real-time
    task.

One particular type of interactive visualization is virtual reality (VR), where the visual representation of information is presented using an immersive display device such as a stereo projector (see stereoscopy). VR is also characterized by the use of a spatial metaphor, where some aspect of the information is represented in three dimensions so that humans can explore the information as if it were present (where instead it was remote), sized appropriately (where instead it was on a much smaller or larger scale than humans can sense directly), or had shape (where instead it might be completely abstract).

Another type of interactive visualization is collaborative visualization, in which multiple people interact with the same computer visualization to communicate their ideas to each other or to explore information cooperatively. Frequently, collaborative visualization is used when people are physically separated. Using several networked computers, the same visualization can be presented to each person simultaneously. The people then make annotations to the visualization as well as communicate via audio (i.e., telephone), video (i.e., a video-conference), or text (i.e., IRC) messages.

Human control of visualization

The Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System (PHIGS) was one of the first programmatic efforts at interactive visualization and provided an enumeration of the types of input humans provide. People can:

  1. Pick some part of an existing visual representation;
  2. Locate a point of interest (which may not have an existing representation);
  3. Stroke a path;
  4. Choose an option from a list of options;
  5. Valuate by inputting a number; and
  6. Write by inputting text.

All of these actions require a physical device. Input devices range from the common –

mice, graphics tablets, trackballs, and touchpads – to the esoteric – wired gloves, boom arms, and even omnidirectional treadmills
.

These input actions can be used to control both the unique information being represented or the way that the information is presented. When the information being presented is altered, the visualization is usually part of a

feedback loop
. For example, consider an aircraft avionics system where the pilot inputs roll, pitch, and yaw and the visualization system provides a rendering of the aircraft's new attitude. Another example would be a scientist who changes a simulation while it is running in response to a visualization of its current progress. This is called computational steering.

More frequently, the representation of the information is changed rather than the information itself.

Rapid response to human input

Experiments have shown that a delay of more than 20

framerate is often used to measure how interactive a visualization is. Framerates measure the frequency with which an image (a frame) can be generated by a visualization system. A framerate of 50 frames per second (frame/s) is considered good while 0.1 frame/s would be considered poor. The use of framerates to characterize interactivity is slightly misleading however, since framerate is a measure of bandwidth while humans are more sensitive to latency
. Specifically, it is possible to achieve a good framerate of 50 frame/s but if the images generated refer to changes to the visualization that a person made more than 1 second ago, it will not feel interactive to a person.

The rapid response time required for interactive visualization is a difficult constraint to meet and there are several approaches that have been explored to provide people with rapid visual feedback based on their input. Some include

  1. depth buffer
    can then be sent across the network and merged with the images from other computers. The result is a single frame containing all the information to be rendered, even though no single computer's memory held all of the information. This is called parallel depth compositing and is used when large amounts of information must be rendered interactively.
  2. Progressive rendering – where a framerate is guaranteed by rendering some subset of the information to be presented and providing incremental (progressive) improvements to the rendering once the visualization is no longer changing.
  3. Level-of-detail (
    MRI scans, and finite difference simulations), a lower resolution version can easily be generated by skipping n points for each 1 point rendered. Subsampling can also be used to accelerate rendering techniques such as volume visualization that require more than twice the computations for an image twice the size. By rendering a smaller image and then scaling
    the image to fill the requested screen space, much less time is required to render the same data.
  4. Frameless rendering – where the visualization is no longer presented as a time series of images, but as a single image where different regions are updated over time.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0961392118
    .
  2. ISBN 0961392142
    .
  3. ISBN 0961392126
    .
  4. ^ "evl – electronic visualization laboratory". www.evl.uic.edu. Retrieved 2 September 2018.
  5. ^ "Scientific Visualization." sciencedaily.com. Science Daily, 2010. Retrieved from web https://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/s/scientific_visualization.htm. on 17 November 2011.
  6. ^ "Scientific Visualization." Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, n.d. Retrieved from web http://www.sci.utah.edu/research/visualization.html. on 17 November 2011.
  7. ^ Michael Friendly (2008). "Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization". Project moved to http://datavis.ca/milestones/
  8. ^ (Burkhard and Meier, 2004),
  9. ISSN 1847-9375
    .
  10. S2CID 49640048
    .
  11. ^ "3D Workflows in Global E-Commerce". www.dgg3d.com. 28 February 2020. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  12. ISBN 0-7695-2323-4

Further reading

External links
Conferences

Many conferences occur where interactive visualization academic papers are presented and published.

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