A Tri-Space Visualization Interface for Analyzing Time-Varying Multivariate Volume Data

Abstract

The dataset generated by a large-scale numerical simulation may include thousands of timesteps and hundreds of variables describing different aspects of the modeled physical phenomena. In order to analyze and understand such data, scientists need the capability to explore simultaneously in the temporal, spatial, and variable domains of the data. Such capability, however, is not generally provided by conventional visualization tools. This paper presents a new visualization interface addressing this problem. The interface consists of three components which abstracts the complexity of exploring in temporal, variable, and spatial domain, respectively. The first component displays time histograms of the data, helps the user identify timesteps of interest, and also helps specify time-varying features. The second component displays correlations between variables in parallel coordinates and enables the user to verify those correlations and possibly identity unanticipated ones. The third component allows the user to more closely explore and validate the data in spatial domain while rendering multiple variables into a single visualization in a user controllable fashion. Each of these three components is not only an interface but is also the visualization itself, thus enabling efficient screen-space usage. The three components are tightly linked to facilitate tri-space data exploration, which offers scientists new power to study their time-varying, multivariate volume data.