Master's Thesis - Studierstube Augmented Reality Project - Graz ...

2.1 Technical Visualization
2.1 Technical Visualization
Visualization can be defined as a technique for exploration and presentation of data
as well. According to [Wijk2005] the creation of images, diagrams or animations to
communicate a certain message, is just as important as the exploration of new and
unknown datasets.
Two main fields of technical visualizations can be divided in the following: information
visualization and scientific visualization. The difference between them is the kind
of data they operate on. Information visualization attempts to efficiently map data
variables onto visual dimensions in order to create graphic representations [Gee2005].
Abstract data is data that has no inherent mapping to space and can cover nearly
everything from databases to statistics or biochemical processes. The main objective
is in most cases the arrangement of abstract data intuitively for the user sight.
Scientific visualization should be treated in opposition to information visualization
since it deals with physically-based data mainly with spatial character. This means all
but everything which can be measured with a sensor or sensor-related devices. This
makes it relatively easy to visualize physical data in an intuitive way by mapping the
space coordinates in the dataset to screen coordinates as discussed by [Voigt2002]. Figure
2.1 illustrates the differences between information- and scientific visualization by
two examples. They show on the left hand side the files used for this thesis but ordered
by their size, using the tool from [Eindhoven2002], which refers to information visualization.
The right hand side example shows a weather heat-map for the temperature
distribution of a day in June which refers to scientific visualization due to the spatial
correlation of its base data.
In the next section the field of scientific visualization will be investigated more
closely. The aspects of presentation of potentially huge quantities of data and representation
approaches to aid the exploration, presentation and hypotheses generation
from them will be a matter of particular interest.
2.1.1 Scientific Visualization
The main parts of this area of research are volume visualization and flow visualization
[Hauser2002]. To provide an overview over this topic some major visualization
approaches are discussed in the following.
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