The Safari Interface for Visualizing Time-Dependent Volume Data Using Iso-Surfaces and a Control Plane

Abstract

We describe a prototype interface for the visualization of time-varying volume data of one or several variables as they occur in scientific and engineering applications. We partition the data dimensions into a 3D viewer for iso-surfaces and a 2D control plane where each point selects a particular iso-surface in 3D. A pre-computed color-coding of the control plane and a small preview window help the user to navigate the volune data. We use the number of connected components of the iso-surface as an example of a color-coding that we can compute efficiently and automatically using contour trees. The success of this interface opens interesting avenues of research into geometric data structures to support remote visualization of time-varying volume data.