Minimally-immersive Interactive Volumetric Information Visualization

Published in the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization as a short paper.

Copyright 1996 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 28 October to 29 October 1996, San Francisco, USA. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE.


Abstract

This paper describes a minimally-immersive three-dimensional volumetric interactive system for the visualization of information. The system, SFA, uses glyph-based volume rendering, enabling more information attributes to be visualized than traditional 2D and 2.5D information visualization systems. The use of glyph rendering allows many information attributes (information space dimensions) to be visualized and perceived. Two-handed interaction using three-space magnetic trackers and stereoscopic viewing are combined to produce a minimally-immersive interactive information visualization system that enhances the user's three-dimensional perception of the information space. This new system capitalizes on the human visual system's pre-attentive learning capabilities to quickly analyze the displayed information. We describe the usefulness of this system for the visualization of document similarity within a corpus of textual documents. SFA allows the three-dimensional volumetric visualization, manipulation, navigation, and analysis of multivariate, time-varying information spaces, increasing the quantity and clarity of information conveyed from the visualization as compared to traditional 2D information systems.

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David S. Ebert (ebert@cs.umbc.edu)
Last modified: 21 November 1996