Published in Computer Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH publications, Vol. 34, No. 1, February 2000. pp. 74-79 (and cover). Practical Scientific Visualization Examples Russell M. Taylor II Department of Computer Science University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
[email protected] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~taylorr/ formation visualization that visualize abstract (of- Abstract ten many-dimensional) spaces. Scientific visualization is not yet a discipline Many excellent systems are unlisted because no founded on well-understood principles. In some published account was found of particular insights cases we have rules of thumb, and there are stud- gained using them, even when the visualization ies that probe the capabilities and limitations of techniques used are obviously powerful. Space specific techniques. For the most part, however, it constraints further limit the number of results pre- is a collection of ad hoc techniques and lovely sented. examples. This article collects examples where visualization was found to be useful for particular Visual Display insights or where it enabled new and fruitful types Viewing spatial data as spatial data of experiments. Lanzagorta and others at NRL looked at the in- Introduction ternal micro- Many examples listed here are drawn from Keller structure of and Keller’s book Visual Cues, a valuable collec- steel by polish- tion of visualization techniques along with de- ing down one scriptions of which techniques apply each visuali- layer at a time zation technique. (Keller and Keller 1993) Many and scanning of the examples are from recent Case Studies pub- each with an lished in the proceedings of the IEEE Visualiza- SEM.