Hypervolume visualization: a challenge in simplicity

Abstract

Hypervolume visualization is designed to provide simple and fully explanatory images that give comprehensive in-sights into the global structure of scalar fields of any dimension. The basic idea is to have a dimension independent viewing system that scales nicely with the geometric dimension of the dataset and that can be combined with classical approaches like isocontouring and animation of slices of nD data. One completely abandons (for core simplicity) rendering techniques, such as hidden surface removal or lighting or radiosity, that enhance three dimensional realism and concentrate on the real-time display of images that highlight structural (topological) features of the no dataset (holes, tunnels, cavities, depressions, extrema, etc.). Hypervolume visualization on the one hand is a generalization of direct parallel projection methods in volume rendering. To achieve efficiency (and real-time performance on a graphics workstation) the authors combine the advantages of (i) a hierarchical representations of the hypervolume data for multiresolution display and (ii) generalized object space splatting combined with texture-mapped graphics hardware acceleration. The main results of the paper are thus both a multiresolution direct rendering algorithm and scalable graphical user interface that provides global views of scalar fields in any dimension, while maintaining the fundamental characteristics of ease of use, and quick exploratory user interaction.