The aim of this exploratory project is to enable scientists to easily create storytelling animations for effective communication of research results. Today visualization has become an indispensable tool for many scientists in their daily work to validate and explore the data obtained from their studies, to discover new findings, and to communicate them with others. Both commercial and open-source visualization tools offer a wealth of visualization techniques, enabling scientists to explore their data and generate individual images which capture key aspects of the subject under study. However, an important need of scientists - creating animations for storytelling - is not sufficiently supported. Scientists make extensive use of animation in the form of videos that explain complex structures or processes. Surprisingly, most visualization packages provide very limited support for making animations. The objectives of this project are to: (1) design an interactive animation interface seamlessly integrated with the visualization interface, and develop optimal strategies for controlling camera movement based on key-frames specified by the user; (2) create a prototype system to assess how well the proposed integrated interface enhances users' ability to create visualization animations for storytelling; and (3) through case studies and a user study, investigate whether animations created using the system effectively illustrate complex processes and spatial relationships. This proof-of-concept study focuses on volume data visualization; however, the results are expected to be generalizable to a wide range of scientific and information visualization. This proposed research is challenging as it seeks to establish understanding of how animations can effectively illustrate evolving structures, spatial relationships, and patterns and what system support is needed to enable users to create expressive animations during data exploration without seeking help from professional animators.
The lessons learned in this study suggest the design of a new framework for next-generation visualization systems that can benefit a broad range of scientists. Educational activities include the integration of research into teaching, in the form of special topic courses, the establishment of internships with industry and national laboratories, and the introduction of the proposed visualization technology to students from other disciplines. Project website (http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/NSF/IIS1255237) is used for results dissemination.
Animation is a versatile and powerful tool for transitioning between views, highlighting data, showing complex spatial structures, and understanding time-varying phenomena. Animation is thus often used for scientific storytelling. However, existing visualization systems do not provide adequate support for making animations. In this project, we have devised a semi-automatic method of generating animations based on user inputs during navigation through a 3D volume data set. We conducted a pilot user study comparing this method to traditional keyframebased animation. Task completion times indicate that users need to spend only half the time creating animations using our method as compared to keyframes, and subjective user ratings indicate that the animations generated by our method are of comparable quality to those created using keyframes. Beyond this EAGER project, we intend to see whether these findings are replicable in completely unsupervised situations – that is, without predefined target images. That is, we believe it's possible to generate a meaningful overview animation of a data set using only the interaction history of a user exploring a data set. This would lead to a method of generating expository animations of data sets without any additional time or effort on the part of users, beyond the initial exploration.
