This lecture provides an introduction into visualization of scientific and abstract data.
Learning objective
This lecture provides an introduction into the visualization of scientific and abstract data. The lecture introduces into the two main branches of visualization: scientific visualization and information visualization. The focus is set onto scientific data, demonstrating the usefulness and necessity of computer graphics in other fields than the entertainment industry. The exercises contain theoretical tasks on the mathematical foundations such as numerical integration, differential vector calculus, and flow field analysis, while programming exercises familiarize with the Visualization Tool Kit (VTK). In a course project, the learned methods are applied to visualize one real scientific data set. The provided data sets contain measurements of volcanic eruptions, galaxy simulations, fluid simulations, meteorological cloud simulations and asteroid impact simulations.
Content
This lecture opens with human cognition basics, and scalar and vector calculus. Afterwards, this is applied to the visualization of air and fluid flows, including geometry-based, topology-based and feature-based methods. Further, the direct and indirect visualization of volume data is discussed. The lecture ends on the viualization of abstract, non-spatial and multi-dimensional data by means of information visualization.
Prerequisites / Notice
Fundamentals of differential calculus. Knowledge on numerical mathematics, computer algebra systems, as well as ordinary and partial differential equations is an asset, but not required.