PhD ceremony Ms. L. Yu: Touching 3D data. Interactive visualization of cosmological simulations

PhD ceremony: Ms. L. Yu, 11.00 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Touching 3D data. Interactive visualization of cosmological simulations

Promotor(s): prof. J.B.T.M. Roerdink

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Visualization aims to augment scientists' senses and imagination in order to allow them to better understand their data. This is an interactive, iterative process that involves information representation, interactive exploration, and decision making. The goal is, through this iterative process, to gain insight into the problem and data until they have been sufficiently understood. A high level of interactivity in visual exploration is essential for efficiently achieving this goal since it allows the user to try out new ideas, receive immediate feedback, and accordingly adjust the exploration.

In this thesis we report about our investigation of the challenges for natural interactions in data exploration tasks in visualization domains that concern themselves with data which are inherently represented three-dimensionally. In this thesis we chose the visualization of astronomical data as a central example application domain focusing on 3D point cloud data resulting from numerical simulations, such as simulations of galactic dynamics or high-dimensional information recorded in the form of particle datasets. We introduce two intuitive and efficient interaction techniques for data exploration in 3D space. The first technique helps users to navigate 3D spaces and the second technique provides users the ability of easily selecting a subset of particle data. Furthermore, we integrate these two techniques in a visual analytic system in order to help scientists extract potentially useful information and gain insight.