FiberClay: Sculpting Three Dimensional Trajectories to Reveal Structural Insights

Abstract

Visualizing 3D trajectories to extract insights about their similarities and spatial configuration is a critical task in several domains. Air traffic controllers for example deal with large quantities of aircrafts routes to optimize safety in airspace and neuroscientists attempt to understand neuronal pathways in the human brain by visualizing bundles of fibers from DTI images. Extracting insights from masses of 3D trajectories is challenging as the multiple three dimensional lines have complex geometries, may overlap, cross or even merge with each other, making it impossible to follow individual ones in dense areas. As trajectories are inherently spatial and three dimensional, we propose FiberClay: a system to display and interact with 3D trajectories in immersive environments. FiberClay renders a large quantity of trajectories in real time using GP-GPU techniques. FiberClay also introduces a new set of interactive techniques for composing complex queries in 3D space leveraging immersive environment controllers and user position. These techniques enable an analyst to select and compare sets of trajectories with specific geometries and data properties. We conclude by discussing insights found using FiberClay with domain experts in air traffic control and neurology.

IATK: An Immersive Analytics Toolkit

“…However, more recent work has shown the potential of head-mounted displays (HMDs) for perception and interaction [4] and collaboration [17]. HMDs have been used to explore networks [35], immersive ego and exocentric maps [56], origin-destination flow maps [55], trajectories and brain fibers [31]. They also offer potential for integrating visualisation into a realworld context by projecting data visualisations into a user's physical environment [5,21,54].…”

“…Although there are existing immersive visualisation toolkits (DXR [47], VR-viz [45], and Glance [24]), IATK has been designed with a focus on scalability, data visualisation design, and user interaction. Additionally, IATK has emerged from several years of development of visualisation applications [17,31] in collaboration with Monash University, the University of South Australia, ENAC and Edinburgh University. IATK builds upon previous work with the following contributions:…”

LassoNet: Deep Lasso-Selection of 3D Point Clouds

“…Up to this point, we have only modeled viewpoint in terms of camera position and direction, but not other parameters. Modeling these parameters would be necessary and interesting, as it can potentially extend the applicability of LassoNet to many other scenarios, e.g., to improve selection in VR/AR environments (e.g., [17,35]).…”

Visual Link Routing in Immersive Visualisations

“…Halpin et al [16] show that the use of virtual reality leads to better insight regarding social network exploration. Finally, Fiber-Clay [21] and NeuroCave [25] uses bundling in immersive environments. However, in most of these cases, users are looking at the graph from the outside (i.e.…”

“…In immersive environments there is very little work on link routing optimisation. Hurter et al propose to use an exocentric (the user's position is not taken into account) 3D edge bundling in FiberClay [21]. Kwon et al use an egocentric spherical layout (surrounding the user's view point) to visualise a graph [29].…”