Information Visualisation And Virtual Environments

Linking the two areas together, this book presents the latest research and development, so as to highlight the potential of information visualisation as an enabling technology in the design of new generations of virtual environments. This will be an invaluable source of reference for courses in information visualisation, user interface design, virtual environments, HCI, and information retrieval, as well as a useful resource for consultants and practitioners. The book contains 144 colour images of intriguing and influential works in information visualisation.

Information visualization is not only about creating graphical displays of complex and latent information structures. It also contributes to a broader range of cognitive, social, and collaborative activities. This is the first book to examine information visualization from this perspective. This 2nd edition continues the unique and ambitious quest for setting information visualization and virtual environments in a unifying framework. It pays special attention to the advances made over the last 5 years and potentially fruitful directions to pursue. It is particularly updated to meet the need for practitioners. The book is a valuable source for researchers and graduate students.

Writing Virtual Environments for Software Visualization book describes the software for a networked, 3D multi-user virtual environment that allows users to create and share remotely visualizations of program behavior. Collaborative virtual environments such as World of Warcraft or Second Life are a popular way to share interactive internet experiences, but they are complex and difficult to create. Software visualization is an area that may enable important advances in our ability to understand and reduce the costs of maintaining software. Applying the former technology to this problem area will be valuable to distributed and multi-institutional software development and educational users. The author covers the major features of collaborative virtual environments and how to program them in a very high level language. The book also examines the application of popular game-like software technologies.

Information visualization is not only about creating graphical displays of complex and latent information structures. It also contributes to a broader range of cognitive, social, and collaborative activities. This is the first book to examine information visualization from this perspective. This 2nd edition continues the unique and ambitious quest for setting information visualization and virtual environments in a unifying framework. It pays special attention to the advances made over the last 5 years and potentially fruitful directions to pursue. It is particularly updated to meet the need for practitioners. The book is a valuable source for researchers and graduate students.

"This is a book about what the science of perception can tell us about visualization. There is a gold mine of information about how we see to be found in more than a century of work by vision researchers. The purpose of this book is to extract from that large body of research literature those design principles that apply to displaying information effectively"--

II Challenges in Data Mapping Part II deals with one of the most challenging tasks in Interactive Visualization, mapping and teasing out information from large complex datasets and generating visual representations. This section consists of four chapters. Binh Pham, Alex Streit, and Ross Brown provide a comprehensive requirement analysis of information uncertainty visualizations. They examine the sources of uncertainty, review aspects of its complexity, introduce typical models of uncertainty, and analyze major issues in visualization of uncertainty, from various user and task perspectives. Alfred Inselberg examines challenges in the multivariate data analysis. He explains how relations among multiple variables can be mapped uniquely into ?-space subsets having geometrical properties and introduces Parallel Coordinates meth- ology for the unambiguous visualization and exploration of a multidimensional geometry and multivariate relations. Christiaan Gribble describes two alternative approaches to interactive particle visualization: one targeting desktop systems equipped with programmable graphics hardware and the other targeting moderately sized multicore systems using pack- based ray tracing. Finally, Christof Rezk Salama reviews state-of-the-art strategies for the assignment of visual parameters in scientific visualization systems. He explains the process of mapping abstract data values into visual based on transfer functions, clarifies the terms of pre- and postclassification, and introduces the state-of-the-art user int- faces for the design of transfer functions.

formation. The basic ideas underlying knowledge visualization and information vi- alization are outlined. In a short preview of the contributions of this volume, the idea behind each approach and its contribution to the goals of the book are outlined. 2 The Basic Concepts of the Book Three basic concepts are the focus of this book: "data", "information", and "kno- edge". There have been numerous attempts to define the terms "data", "information", and "knowledge", among them, the OTEC Homepage "Data, Information, Kno- edge, and Wisdom" (Bellinger, Castro, & Mills, see http://www.syste- thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm): Data are raw. They are symbols or isolated and non-interpreted facts. Data rep- sent a fact or statement of event without any relation to other data. Data simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself.

Selected papers from this year’s Workshops on Virtual Environments and on Visualization in Scientific Computing are included in this volume. The papers on VE discuss Virtual Environment System architecture, communication requirements, synthetic actors, crowd simulations and modeling aspects, application experience in surgery support, geographic information systems, and engineering and virtual housing systems. Contributions from the Visualization workshop are presented in four groups: volume rendering, user interfaces in scientific visualization, architecture of scientific visualization systems and flow visualization.