Metaphors for Visualization

Abstract:

This work investigates the use of several common objects such as spray cans, flashlights, carving knives, and others as metaphors for visualization. The motivation behind this work is to provide an intuitive and natural 3D interface such that users will view these objects as tools during the visualization process. To help achieve this goal, the selection of the object tools are derived from expressions commonly used during visualization. For example, let's paint this (iso)surface red; cut away the front part of that volume; look at it from this angle; you get similar effects from an x-ray photo; and let's explore this data set. In this work, we also extend the metaphor of cutting planes to allow users to carve non-planar cross-sectional cuts through their data sets. This extension will directly benefit applications such as medical visualization where one might want to generate curved coronal cross-sections of lumbar spines; and in oceanography where one might want to compare numerical model output against data obtained along non-planar ship tracks.

Paper:

A postscript version of the paper presented at the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Visualization in Scientific Computing can be obtained by clicking here