Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Avenir: Advanced Visual Exploration with Non-photorealisitic and Interactive Rendering

Participants : Tobias Isenberg, Jean-Daniel Fekete [correspondant] , Pierre Dragicevic.

AVIZ and CNRS/LIMSI have invited Tobias Isenberg on a Digiteo Chair of Excellence, a very prestigious and competitive position offered by the Digiteo Consortium on the Saclay area. Tobias will be collaborating with both teams on a project call AVENIR: “Advanced Visual Exploration with Non-photorealisitic and Interactive Rendering”.

This project will take a unique research approach to visualization that is situated at the intersection of several related directions: scientific and information visualization, non-photorealistic and illustrative rendering, and interaction on large displays. It aims to establish this area as a new research direction within the scope of the newly emerging domain of illustrative visualization which takes inspiration both from traditional illustration and computer-driven visualization. For this purpose we will investigate how to integrate both direct-touch interaction and non-photorealistic rendering into traditional scientific and information visualization applications.

On the one side, we will use techniques from non-photorealistic and illustrative rendering to provide abstraction and emphasis as well as make use of its ability to provide clear and understandable depictions. In addition, we will investigate the possibility for data reduction. Some non-photorealistic techniques can provide faster rendering than their photorealistic counterparts and can, thus, inspired the transfer of these techniques to visualization applications. This will greatly improve the visualization of large amounts of data.

On the other side, we will use direct-touch interaction on large displays to provide an intuitive and easily approachable platform for integrated visualization applications that allow the exploration of the large amounts of data we want to visualize. This specific setting not only allows a person to interact with a visualization in a very direct way but also affords collaborative visualization for small groups of scientists. This will create synergies from discussions between colleagues or in the context of small research teams which otherwise would not be possible for a single person.

This integration of visualization with non-photorealistic rendering and large-display interaction will not only integrate well with existing research directions of the two participating Digiteo teams, but also provide them with exciting new application domains: it will use concepts from both scientific visualization (VENISE) and information visualization (AVIZ) and will apply large display concepts (VENISE). Through this collaboration this grant will lead the way toward a new way of presenting and exploring scientific data.