Visualization for Education

A Compilation of Resources Intended as a starting point for a dialog on Accessible Visualization for Educational Applications

Jeff Sale, Staff Scientist
The NPACI SDSU Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering

The following list of resources and information begins with a series of exemplary applications categorized by the various scales they most closely pertain to. These examples are followed by brief overviews of issues related to visualization. Finally, a partial list of hardware and software technology resources is provided.

Applications: The Microscopic Scale

Physics

Science Space

• NewtonWorld
• MaxwellWorld

Molecular Exploration

Protein Explorer

Chime

Rasmol (a precursor to Protein Explorer)

Virtual Molecular Dynamics Laboratory

Science Space

• PaulingWorld

Applications: The Anthroscopic (Human) Scale

Medical Research

The Visible Human Project
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html

The Digital Anatomist
http://www9.biostr.washington.edu/da.html

Muscle Physiology
http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/movies/actin_myosin.html

Applications: The Geoscopic (Planetary) Scale

Geophysics of Earthquakes

Geo-referenced Heterogeneous Data Integration and Visualization for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation
Scripps Vizlab, Debi Kilb
ECCSE, Sara Whipple, Jeff Sale

Visual Geophysical Exploration Environment

9/11 Pentagon Crash Simulation

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cmh/simulation/index.html

Earth Flythroughs

Terra Explorer , from Skyline Software (not to be confused with Microsoft's Terra Server)

Google Earth, possibly the best commercially available and reasonably affordable 3D planetary flythrough program

Geofusion , tremendous potential, a bit pricey ($8000, or $2500 for one year), recently announced as the 3D tool to be integrated into ESRI's ArcGIS system, and major accomplishment.

World Wind, a free application from NASA's JPL. Very cool, a bit buggy, but very oriented towards academic and not commercial applications.

Urban Modeling

Virtual Los Angeles, UCLA
http://www.ust.ucla.edu/ustweb/ust.html

3D Regional Planning, Tampa Planning Commission (using Terra Explorer from Skyline Software)
http://www.plancom.org/visual/webpages/startmenu.htm

ENVIRONMENTAL SIMULATION CENTER, LTD.
http://www.simcenter.org/About_Us/about_us.html

Ecological Modeling

http://landscape.forest.wisc.edu/Projects/Visualization/visualization.html

Wisconsin Coastal GIS Applications Project
http://coastal.lic.wisc.edu/visualization/Visualization.htm

James Reserve - UC Irvine, Michael Hamilton, Director
http://www.jamesreserve.edu/news.html

Shockwave 3D Interactive Interface to SDSU Field Station Data

http://www.edcenter.sdsu.edu/3d/fuse3d/

Regional Planning and Decision-making: the Regional WorkBench Consortium

World-building programs

Virtual Terrain Project

VTP's e xtensive list of Commercial Terrain Tools & Software Packages

TerraVision

World Builder

World Construction Set

Muse Corp.

Pandromeda's MojoWorld

Shadowlight-Mirage

Device-Independent Virtual Environments - Reconfigurable, Scalable, Extensible (DIVERSE)

Bryce 5

-Tutorial on 3D World-building with Bryce

Network Traffic Visualization

CAIDA and NLANR

http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/gallery1/

Applications: The Macroscopic Scale

3D Space Simulation

Celestia: A 3D Space Simulator

Open Universe: a predecessor to Celestia that is no longer supported but deserves credit for being the first with such a vision

Astrophysics

NPACI Milky Way/Andromeda Collision
http://www.npaci.edu/online/v4.9/galaxies2.html

NASA Images of Earth and Space (from NASA's Computational Technologies Project)
http://sdcd.gsfc.nasa.gov/ESS/images2/transcript.html

Orion Nebula Simulation
http://vis.sdsc.edu/research/orion.html

'Visualization' is not Synonymous with '3D':
Brief Overview of 1D and 2D Viz

Dots and Lines and Areas

Interactive Mapping SDSU Internet Mapping	Chaotic Bifurcation Maps Interactive Logistic Map	Space-Time Analysis of Regional System (STARS)	Gallery of Data Visualization

Time as the 3rd dimension

Cascade (Waterfall) Plots

Compressed Spectral Array

Spatiotemporal Isosurfaces

Spatiotemporal isosurfaces are a way of representing 2-dimensional data as it changes over time. Learn more...

Perception Issues in Visualization

The visual system is just a part of your perceptual repertoire

This is your brain...	This is your visual system...
Are we perhaps neglecting something??

Excerpts from Mike Bailey's 1999 GA Plasma Workshop Presentation on Visualization

Sensitivity to Visible Emission Spectrum of the Sun
http://sd.znet.com/~schester/facts/solar_energy.html

3D Stereo Modes of Representation

Freeviewing Stereograms

• Random Dot
• Dual Photo

How to 'freeview' 3D stereograms

Stereograms for 3D Models of SDSU and Mission Trails Regional Park

Orion Nebula stereograms

http://www.studio3d.com/pages/compstereo.html

Polarized Display (Screen or Glasses)

Stereographics Corp.
http://www.stereographics.com/

Panoram Technologies Corp.
http://www.panoramtech.com/

Chromadepth

http://dvl.sdsc.edu/chromadepth/

Traditional Stereoscopes

http://www.studio3d.com/pages/compstereo.html

3D Visualization "Hardcopy"

SDSC's Telemanufacturing Facility
http://tmf.sdsc.edu/Examples/examples.html

More 'Hardcopy' Examples ...

Immersive or "Pseudo-immersive" 3D Technologies

Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) CAVERN

GeoWall

Virtual Research

NuVision Stereoscopic Display

Stereographics Corp.
http://www.stereographics.com/

Panoram Technologies Corp.
http://www.panoramtech.com/

Spatial Tracking Systems

Polhemus

Ascension "Flock-of-birds"

Force-feedback Systems

Immersion Technologies

Local Visualization Centers

SDSC Visualization Center

The SDSC Visualization Lab is headed by Dr. Mike Bailey. Mike is one of the leaders at educating the world about the various issues involved in visualization, bringing it down to earth and making it understandable.

http://vis.sdsc.edu/

UCSD/Scripps Vizlab

Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics

Ida and Helen Green Visualization Center (the Revelle Conference Room)

http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu/

Debi Kilb, Director, Geophysicist

SDSU Vizlab

http://www.calit2.net/visualization/dedication_3-4-02.html

Visualization Software, Hardware, Organizations

Software

Advanced Visualization System (AVS) and Muse
http://www.avs.com/

OpenDX
Open Source version of IBM's Data Explorer
http://www.opendx.org/

ViPEr
http://www.scripps.edu/~sanner/python/viper/index.html

3D Active Chart
http://www.rinvoice.com/activechart.htm

SPIRE, Pacific Northwest Labs
http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/

Starlight, Pacific Northwest Labs
http://starlight.pnl.gov/

SCIRun
http://software.sci.utah.edu/

Paradigm's Voxel GEO

Fledermaus and IView 3D

POV Ray (Persistence Of View Ray Tracer)

SDSC MPIRE
http://mpire.sdsc.edu/

Matlab

Mathematica

Maple

Hardware

SGI Infinite Reality 4

SGI Onyx 3000 Series - 141 million triangles per second and 3.8 billion pixels per second to a single display

SGI Onyx 300 - 32 MIPS® R14000TM 600 MHz CPUs and up to 8 InfiniteReality family graphics pipes. It offers up to 11.2Gbytes per second of sustained I/O bandwidth

SGI Visual Area Networking

NPACI Blue Horizon

Desktop Graphics Card Overview

Organizations

ACM SIGs, particularly SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI

Xerox Parc

NPACI

NCSA

SDSC

Additional Links

Collaborative Visualization

Walden RC-SIG Earth Science Collaborative Visualization

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