<title>Interactive analysis of transient field data</title>

Abstract

Many recently developed visualization systems have tended to exclude direct user control of the real-time 'coordinate' of workstation displays, relative to the extent that they provide for direct control of the use of the spatial coordinates. That is, for displaying a given static (time- invariant) object, the user is in direct control of the level of detail of spatial information. 'Zooming-in' means that more detail is displayed within the specified spatial clipping limits, and no information is displayed beyond these limits. There has tended to be no analogous approach to the use of the real-time coordinate of the display. In this paper, the authors introduce a method for explicitly providing for direct interactive user control over the use of the real-time coordinate. In addition to the usual VCR control buttons, in this system the user has interactive control over the playback speed, and the start time and finish time along the t coordinate of the underlying field domain. Sliding the start and finish time scales is analogous to altering the spatial clipping limits of the viewing projection. If the start and finish times are moved closer to each other and the play speed is reduced, then a higher resolution sequence is computed and displayed, and display information beyond these limits is discarded. This involves real-time monitoring of compute and display cycles, to faithfully exploit the real time of the display as a visualization dimension. This capability empowers the user with the ability to easily focus particular interest on features at particular parts of the space and time of the underlying field.© (1991) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.