Human Factors In Information Visualization
Good information visualization requires both knowledge of human perception and of computer graphics. But, visualization designers have paid relatively little attention to perceptual issues. Consequently, a picture is painted but not understood.
- ERGO/GERO, a human factors science consulting firm, does a credible job at explaining and amplifying upon Bertin's Image Theory -- the only comprehensive perceptual theory in the visualization literature.
- Rules and Principles of Scientific Data Visualization is an excellent set of hints (rules) for using different kinds of visualizations. Unfortunately the pictures don't work. In associated links, there are a number of other interesting articles.
- Xerox-PARC offers a well written PDF entitled The Structure Of The Information Visualization Design Space .
The Declarative Programming Model
The core of the Fresh Vista visualization system is the declarative programming model where everything is pre-defined in XML and the sole purpose of the programming code is to interpret the declarations. This paradigm is gaining in popularity. Microsoft will use its declarative XAML in Vista. Glade has been around for some time. The Fresh Vista declarative model is very close to Glade. Here are some links to declarative programming ideas.
- Glade is a Gnome GTK+ Interface Builder. It's XML declarative schema is very simple and quite generic.
- MyXaml is an open source declarative XML schema that works on current Windows operating systems. Unlike Microsoft XAML, it is not restricted to Longhorn.
- The MyXaml site has a great page on declarative vs imperative programming .
Interesting People and Companies
We've had the pleasure of communicating with a number of individuals and companies whose ideas are unique. Here they are.- Piscatus 3D by SMI Ltd shows seabed, boat and trawl gear in real-time. It combines preloaded bathymetry data with the users GPS and soundings data. Comes in three versions Deepsea Pro, Inshore Pro, and Classic for recreational fishing
- Ramana Rao (CTO of Inxight) has a personal web site called Information Flow . Here he presents a number of visualization concepts in his collection of papers. These papers are worth reading. And, Ramana does answer emails.
Network Visualization
From the Internet to our genomes, the being of all things is composed of interacting components and systems. Network theory and network visualization has become a hot topic and a challenge to visualize.
- Tamara Munzner 's extensive and detailed work on the construction and use of a hyperbolic network visualization. This popular context + focus approach to network visualization is used by many in different forms.
- There has been a lot of recent interest in new and wide
ranging ideas regarding networks. These ideas offer explanations for many
self-organizing concepts that were started with chaos theory.
- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Notre Dame University has led important research into scale-free networks. He supplies a long list of his publications .
- Duncan Watts, of Columbia University, has become well known for his work on small world networks. Here is the original Nature article coauthored by Strogatz.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
In the past, GIS has been off on it's own providing geo-referenced analyses and visualizations. But GIS is now becoming more like an essential but integrated tool that fits into the overall scheme of information visualization. Here are a few sites that focus on GIS as a separate discipline.
- Extensive list of links to GIS sites .
- Erdas web site.
- Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) web site.
- NCGIA Core Curriculum for GIS.
Terrain Visualization
Terrain visualization is one of those many areas where GIS ideas become integrated in an overall scheme. Terrain visualization usually refers to 3D views where it is important to see the altitude of things. Flight simulators and line-of-sight telecommunications analyses are useful applications for terrain visualization.
- Ben Discoe's excellent and extensive notes on terrain visualization. Submarine topography is also mentioned.
- Will Evans and Gregg Townsend at the University of Arizona have developed a 3D OpenGL USGS DEM viewer called TopoVista . Their program uses an LOD process based on their work with right triangle irregular networks. Their paper, the NT executable, and source code are available.
- On-line resources for landscape/terrain rendering.
- Good basic article by Paul Martz on Generating Random Fractal Terrains . Source code and demo available.
Scientific Visualization
A Georgia Tech web site says that scientific visualization is "the representation of data graphically as a means of gaining understanding and insight into the data. It is sometimes referred to as visual data analysis. This allows the researcher to gain insight into the system that is studied in ways previously impossible." Well, that sounds to me just like what the business world calls "information visualization".
- NASA provides an annotated bibliography of scientific visualization web sites around the world. <
- An interesting list of computer graphics and scientific visualization centers assembled by the Perceptual Science Laboratory at UC - Santa Cruz.
Computer Graphics
Here's a few handy sites that stress the technical side of all computer graphics including games.
- SIGGRAPH web site.
- SGI's OpenGL web site.
- OpenGL-based rendering techniques .
- Visualization Toolkit (VTK) Home Page. An OpenGL based library for scientific visualization.
- Graphics resources on the Internet.
- Steve Baker's large set of bookmarks on 3D modeling, computer graphics, OpenGL, and other interesting things.
- Dave Eberly's home page where lots of graphics source code is available.
Feel free to contact us at insight [at] freshvista.com
