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Kinetic Visualization
Motion
provides strong visual cues for the perception of shape and depth, as demonstrated
by cognitive scientists and visual artists. This paper presents a novel
visualization technique -- kinetic visualization -- using particle systems
to add supplemental motion cues which can aid in the perception of shape
and spatial relationships of static objects. Based on a set of rules following perceptual and physical
principles, particles flowing over the surface of an object not only bring
out, but also attract attention to essential shape information of the object
that might not be readily visible with conventional rendering that uses
lighting and view changes.
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Replacing
still images with animations in this fashion, we demonstrate with both surface
and volumetric models in a video that in many cases the resulting visualizations
effectively enhance the perception of three-dimensional shape and structure.
The results of a preliminary user study that we have conducted also show clear
evidence that the supplemental motion cues helped.
Download the papers here:
SIGGRAPH 2002 Sketches abstract (4Mb)
IEEE Visualization 2002 Conference paper (4Mb)
An extended version of the paper (to appear in IEEE TVCG 2003) (9Mb)
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Feature-Enhanced Visualization of Multidimensional, Multivariate
Volume Data Using Non-photorealistic Rendering Techniques
This paper presents a set of feature
enhancement techniques coupled
with hardware-accelerated non-photorealistic rendering for generating more
perceptually effective visualization of multidimensional, multivariate volume
data, such as those obtained from typical computational fluid dynamics simulations.
For time-invariant data, one or more variables are used
to either highlight important features in another variable, or add contextural
information to the visualization.
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For time-varying data, rendering of each time step also takes into account
the values at neighboring time steps to reinforce the perception of the changing
features in the data over time. With hardware-accelerated rendering,
interactive visualization becomes possible leading to increased explorability
and comprehension of the data.
Download the paper here:
Pacific Graphics 2002 Conference paper (15Mb)
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Visualizing Very Large-Scale Earthquake Simulations
This paper presents a parallel adaptive rendering algorithm
and its performance for visualizing time-varying
unstructured volume data generated from large-scale
earthquake simulations. The objective is to visualize 3D
seismic wave propagation generated from a 0.5 Hz simulation
of the Northridge earthquake, which is the highest
resolution volume visualization of an earthquake simulation
performed to date. This scalable high-fidelity visualization
solution we provide to the scientists allows
them to explore in the temporal, spatial, and visualization
domain of their data at high resolution.
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This new
high resolution explorability, likely not presently available
to most computational science groups, will help
lead to many new insights. The performance study we
have conducted on a massively parallel computer operated
at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center helps direct
our design of a simulation-time visualization strategy
for the higher-resolution, 1Hz and 2 Hz, simulations.
Download the paper here:
Super Computing 2003 Conference paper (7Mb)
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SLIC: Scheduled Linear Image Compositing for Parallel Volume Rendering
Parallel volume rendering others a feasible solution to the
large data visualization problem by distributing both the
data and rendering calculations among multiple computers
connected by a network. In sort-last parallel volume rendering,
each processor generates an image of its assigned subvolume,
which is blended together with other images to derive
the final image. Improving the eficiency of this compositing
step, which requires interprocesssor communication, is the
key to scalable, interactive rendering.
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The recent trend of using hardware-accelerated volume rendering demands further
acceleration of the image compositing step.
This paper presents a new optimized parallel image compositing algorithm
and its performance on a PC cluster. Our test results
show that this new algorithm others significant savings
over previous algorithms in both communication and compositing
costs. On a 64-node PC cluster with a 100BaseT
network interconnect, we can achieve interactive rendering
rates for images at resolutions up to 1024x1024 pixels at
several frames per second.
Download the paper here:
Parallel Visualization and Graphics 2003 Conference paper (2Mb)
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