introduction to Scientific Visualization

[...]... aims to give readers a start in the field of scientific visualization Someone who works all the way through it (and better still, is able to tackle all of the problems that are set) will be equipped to choose appropriately and apply safely a set of basic techniques to some commonly occurring data types It also aims to provide a stepping stone to other literature that might not be immediately accessible to. .. rubbish Visualisation has thus become ubiquitous As a tool it is powerful but not infallible; this book will try to give an insight into both facets What Is Scientific Visualization? The discipline of visualization1 in scientific computing, or ViSC as it is sometimes abbreviated, is widely recognised to have begun in the 1980s, its birth 1 Much early work took place in the USA and the adoption of the... through Do try to tackle them before looking at the solutions as it is sometimes just as instructive to know why we found a problem difficult, as to be able to solve it Unfortunately, looking first at the solution channels the mind into finding answers, rather than asking questions If you don’t have the specific software to support the problems, at least try to get hold of some software to try out the techniques... applies to what data2 then skip Chap 5 Try to resist the temptation to ‘dip in’ to Chap 6 to find out about techniques for higher dimensions, without having read the earlier sections there You might feel it is all revision, but a number of points are made for 1D and 2D data that are expanded upon later for 3D If you are only interested in visualizing vectors then you can skip to Chap 7 but might need to. .. together with the complexities of the human visual system, can lead us to make representations that might mislead as much as they inform This is recognised as a serious issue – for some years now the IEEE Visualization conferences, a premier forum for researchers in visualization, have begun with a ‘VizLies’ session, the purpose of which is to alert the community to these possibilities An introductory... used to depict the value of a variable The effect is more troublesome with a static visualization such as might appear in a book, but is less of a problem when the user can interact to rotate the object, since this moves the shading and highlights around, thereby helping to resolve any ambiguity We also need to be aware that visual attention varies with the particular colour applied to an object together... colour in visualization is sufficiently important to warrant a whole chapter later in this book 2.1 Understanding Data 17 2.1.3 Using Animation Apart from three spatial dimensions, the only other dimension we meet in the real world is time Though it is natural to express time as animation, there are choices to be made according to the goals of the visualization and, once again, the potential to mislead... speech played back to you a moment after you utter it By means of a combination of the critical fusion frequency and our natural tendency to link static images together (beta movement), different pictures shown faster than about 20Hz will appear to blend into continuous, flicker-free motion During interaction the geometry has therefore to re-render faster than this rate – limiting factors will include... processing per frame also has to include the regeneration of the visualization for each new time step, or possibly re-reading a file of data to acquire the new time step For large datasets or computationally intensive visualization techniques, therefore, ‘live’ animation might not be a possibility at all and we then have to resort to other means One such alternative is to ‘tile’ the display with the... be ‘fire hoses’ of data that we cannot hope to understand without visualization Image credit: IRIS Explorer, test data suite 4 Introduction This Book’s Assumptions Although this book uses no mathematics itself, the concepts and explanations will be made easier to grasp by having studied mathematics to GCSE level or beyond The book makes no assumptions about visualization or computer graphics other than