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Using motion to illustrate static 3D shape--kinetic visualization
Lum E., Stompel A., Ma K. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics9 (2):115-126,2003.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Jan 7 2004

This paper discusses a novel visualization technique, kinetic visualization, which was inspired by the observation that the movement and flow of water, flame from a fire, a school of fish, and similar objects result in the perception of shape. Particles are modeled that flow over a static object so that they accurately reveal the local shape of this object. This is accomplished by forcing these particles to follow certain rules, based on geometry, biology, and physics. These rules are detailed in section 4, and typical examples are: constraining the particles to lie on the depicted surface, particles move along principal-curvature directions (to follow the shape), motion direction of a particle is forced to be compatible with that of its neighbors, particle density is calculated on the basis of magnetic repulsion, and related phenomena.

The vital rendering problem is fully analyzed, and efficient techniques are proposed using point-based and texture-based rendering. Details of the implementation are presented, emphasizing optimal use of commodity PC graphics. An accompanying Web page provides many videos demonstrating not only the outcome of the proposed methods, but also the rules forming the backbone of this research.

Finally, the authors detail a user study, confirming that subjects can identify minima and maxima of a surface easier using kinetic visualization instead of traditional Phong shading. There is only one minor negative point about this publication: the authors do not attempt to solve the particle color problem, and rely on user involvement to specify appropriate colors for the moving particles.

Reviewer:  Nickolas S. Sapidis Review #: CR128855 (0405-0670)
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Color, Shading, Shadowing, And Texture (I.3.7 ... )
 
 
Motion (I.4.8 ... )
 
 
Physically Based Modeling (I.3.5 ... )
 
 
Visible Line/ Surface Algorithms (I.3.7 ... )
 
 
Computational Geometry And Object Modeling (I.3.5 )
 
 
Scene Analysis (I.4.8 )
 
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