Lecture 5

Information Visualization

Before we get to today's topics I want to take a few minutes and have everyone introduce themselves - things like your name, major, degree you are currently going after, what your interests are, whether you are enrolled in the course or just sitting in, etc.

For the first presentations, which start next week, you should pick a visualization routine from vtk, or some data collection apparatus, and briefly explain it to the class in a 10 minute presentation. For a vtk related talk giving an interactive demo is probably a really good idea. You can take a look at some of the presentation topics from previous years to get some ideas in this area.

There are many info-viz tools with similar abilities. The one we will take a look at is XmdvTool, and it has a homepage at: http://davis.wpi.edu/~xmdv/

There is a full version and a java 'lite' version, so free and its nicely portable (except that one of the necessary libraries is currently unavailable for the mac)

Another similar tool that hasn't been updated in several months is Mirage - http://www.bell-labs.com/project/mirage/

Here are some notes introducing Xmdv from a study done by one of our PhD students, Kyoung Park, a couple years ago.

The XmdvTool site has a downloadable version of the car dataset from the examples. In order to run it with the lite version however you will need to edit the fcars.okc file so that the top of the file looks like this:

7 392
MPG
Cylinders
Horsepower
Weight
Acceleration
Year
Origin
8. 50. 4
2.8 8.2 4
40. 250. 4
1500. 5500. 4
5. 30. 4
69.5 82.5 4
.8 3.2 3
18.000000 8.000000 130.000000 3504.000000 12.000000 70.000000 1.000000

Coming Next Time

SciViz at EVL

last revision 1/29/07