Lecture 9

Animation in Scientific Visualization

Another major use of computer animation is in scientific visualiation.

In CS 526 When I talk about scientific visualization it is typically interactive visualizations where the user is dynamically manipulating the visualization to gain insight into the data. When the data is time varying it can be very useful to watch the visualization evolve in time.

Here is a nice set of notes on visualization to get you started:
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2005/Viola-vistutillustrativevis/

Here visual realism is not important, rather the focus is on using motion to make it easier to see patterns.

These four examples deal with similar phenomena, but use computer animation in different ways to show different things. The Computer Graphics II course deals with the creation of scientific visualizations, but more from an interactive point of view. In these cases where the goal is a non-interactive movie, more computation power can be used, appropriate camera positions can be chosen, and the experience of the creator can be leveraged.

• Importance of understanding the phenomena being visualized and the data needed to visualize it
• Importance of showing enough data to make the pattern clear and put it into context, but not so much that the imagery and pattern is confusing
• Importance of  choosing the right level of abstraction for the various datasets
• Importance of good camera angles
• Importance of choosing the correct colours, transparency, line thickness etc
  

What Makes a Good Graphic

• induce you to think about the substance rather than the form
• encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data
• reveal the data at several levels of detail
• avoid distortion

So lets take a look at some current visualizations.

As you watch these for the first time, thing about what you learned that first time. Then as we watch them again, think about how the visualization is trying to help ou understand these complex phenomena.

Here is a nice NASA page with many current animations:

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Coming Next Time

Project 1 Presentations