Scientists open their eyes
to visualization's potential

(Page 4 of 4)

The inability to visualize all million atoms in Crowley's simulation is not uncommon. In fact, visualization scientists are urging application scientists to engage in on-site filtering of data for visualization, since it can take days just to port in a raw data set.

"There's too much data," says Kwan-Liu Ma, professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis and principal investigator for the SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization (UltraVIS). "We want to give the scientist control over what to show (and) how to visually represent a particular feature &ndash a pattern or structure or trend &ndash that they intend to study or to show to others."

All scientific measurements have uncertainty &ndash traditionally shown as "error bars" on charts &ndash and as data is computed, processed and visualized, error can propagate with every time step. But, Johnson asks, "When was the last time you saw an error bar on a 3-D scientific visualization? We see these beautiful images that capture the geometry and the simulation results, but we still need to also capture the uncertainties and the errors that are in involved in the simulation process."

How to visualize uncertainty is just one of the opportunities for adding meaning to scientific visualization. As the visualizations demonstrate, there is a true art to fusing scientific accuracy, explanatory power and compelling beauty.

Says Ma, "We want to combine the power of computing and the power of human perception. That makes our job fun."

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