<title>Data visualization using automatic perceptually motivated shapes</title>

Abstract

This paper describes a new technique for the multi-dimensional visualization of data through automatic procedural generation of glyph shapes based on mathematical functions. Our glyph-based Stereoscopic Field Analyzer (SFA) system allows the visualization of both regular and irregular grids of volumetric data. SFA uses a glyph's location, 3D size, color and opacity to encode up to 8 attributes of scalar data per glyph. We have extended SFA's capabilities to explore shape variation as a visualization attribute. We opted for a procedural approach, which allows flexibility, data abstraction, and freedom from specification of detailed shapes. Superquadrics are a natural choice to satisfy our goal of automatic and comprehensible mapping of data to shape. For our initial implementation we have chosen superellipses. We parameterize superquadrics to allow continuous control over the "roundness" or "pointiness" of the shape in the two major planes which intersect to form the shape, allowing a very simple, intuitive, abstract schema of shape specification.

Glyph sorting: Interactive visualization for multi-dimensional data

“…The design of glyphs is the process of encoding attributes of a data entity to a number of visual channels such as size, colour and texture that forms a small visual object. Building on previous works, 11,24,25 we propose the following design principles for the creation of sortable glyphs to be used in interactive sorting as part of a visualization process.…”

“…frequency vs amplitude in sound analysis) without referring to the visualization itself. Bertin 24 refers to this as external identification. Legends convey the relationships between dimensions and visual channels and its representation for a given discrete or continuous value.…”

Visualizing multiple error-sensitivity fields for single camera positioning

“…Barr [3] presents such an approach by introducing primitives (superquadrics) used for creating and simulating threedimensional scenes. Shaw et al [33] describe an interactive glyph-based framework to visualize multi-dimensional data using superquadrics which then Kindlmann [17] extends further to visualize tensor fields.…”

An Evaluation of Glyph Perception for Real Symmetric Traceless Tensor Properties

“…An important issue in glyph visualization is the comprehensibility of such markers—how accurately do they communicate tensor characteristics? Ebert and others have investigated superquadric glyphs for general high dimension visualization [ERS*00, SEK*98]; but that study leaves open the question of the effectiveness of established tensor glyphs. In this work, we report the results of an empirical study to address that question, using nematic liquid crystal alignment tensors as basis.…”