Everyday Scientific Visualization: Making 3D Visualization Techniques Accessible for Day-To-Day Team-Science Collaboration and Analysis

Abstract

This dissertation aims to make scientific visualizations accessible for day-to-day operation of team-science. Building upon previous work that support visualization tasks in a wide range of devices and context but focus on non-spatial and spatial 2D visualizations, we introduce techniques, mechanisms, and frameworks that make visualizations of spatial 3D datasets accessible for immersive data analytics, education, and collaboration.In the first research direction, we focus on providing engaging approaches for the public to explore high-end scientific data and introduce a VR-based visualization technique not only for immersive exploration but also for comparison-based exploration and presentation. The approach extends Portal and WIM techniques to create a unifying metaphor for comparative immersive visualization. Within the application to comparing plots from the US Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis dataset, the technique was successfully used to confirm known and discover new trends in the data. In the second research direction, we explore new widely accessible, low-cost VR displays for data visualization and introduce the first example of a 2D + 3D VR linked view visualization on a mobile device. Showing plots in the forestry dataset, the visualization provide limited exploration capabilities, compared to our first visualization, but it provide users more accessible forms for education and training. In the last direction, we focus on supporting collaboration across these visualization approaches---1) high-end but with computation requirements and 2) lightweight but with limited flexibility---and introduce a framework facilitating multi-person correspondence about spatial datasets for team-science collaboration. By integrating storytelling metaphor with support for spatial annotations, the framework enables users to present findings with data stories made of visuals from exploratory spatial 3D visualizations. With a flexible export of visualization results, the data stories are distributed to complementary client applications and plugins that enable different styles of story co-authorings for discussion of spatial 3D analysis. We report on user feedback and lessons learned from a deployment within a team-science context where it was used as a cross-disciplinary communication tool for visual analysis of the Antarctic ice sheets.