Scientific visualization

Scientific Visualization is a branch of computer graphics which is concerned with the presentation of interactive or animated digital images to scientists or to anyone who has to interpret huge quantities of laboratory data or the results coming in from sensors out in the field.

Popular presence

Most people are familiar with the digital animations produced to present meteorological data during weather reports on television, though few can distinguish between those models of reality and the satellite photos which are also shown on such programs. TV also offers scientific visualisations when it shows computer drawn and animated reconstructions of road or airplane accidents.

Some of the most popular examples of scientific visualzations are those computer generated images which show spacecraft in action, out in the void far beyond Earth, or on other planets.

Scientific Visualisations in Engineering

Some attribute the birth of Scientific Visualisation to the efforts of electrical engineering professionals in the 1980s. This is a highly debated topic. Others point to such efforts as the mainframe generated Chernoff faces of the 1970s, which we owe to the noted mathematician Herman Chernoff. These multivariate expressions of data were, in their original form, not interactive or animated, but their supporters point out that animated and/or interactive versions are now available.

Scientific Visualisations in the Life Sciences

Desktop programs capable of presenting interactive models of molecules and microbiological entities are becoming relatively common. The field of Bioinformatics and the field of Cheminformatics make a heavy use of these visualization engines for interpreting lab data and for training purposes. Since this field has known its biggest growth spurt at about the same time as the Web, it is keen on integrating metadata formats such as the XML based Chemical Markup Language, while being cosncious of older formats such as SMILES.

Types of Scientific Visualisations

Apart from the distinction between interactive visualizations and animation, the most useful categorization is probably between abstract and model based Scientific Visualizations. The abstract visualisations show completely cocneptual constructs in 2D or 3D. These generated shapes are completely arbitrary. The model based visualisations either place overlays of data on real or digitally constructed images of reality, or they make a digital construction of a real object directly form the scientific data.

Spin-offs and relations

The field of Data mining offers many abstract visualizations related to scientific visualisation. There is in a sense a wider field, that of Information Visualization which encompasses all visualizations that do not deal with the life sciences or engineering.