Visualization Software Architectures for Arts, Humanities, and STEM Integration

ABR Interface

Artifact-Based Rendering is grounded in metaphors of printmaking, connecting our work in complex graphics processes with the practices of the artistic community. ABR layers glyphs, lines, and surfaces with color and shape the way a printmaker might approach image-making in their studio.

The user interface has five primary workable components:

• Key Data: geometric representations of your data (points, lines, surfaces), loaded from VTK unstructured grid files, each piece of key data has associated scalar & vector variables
• Data Impressions: your “layers” of data in the visualization. Apply variables and visual elements to each data impression, and watch as they are composed in real time in your visualization.
• Data Palette: the panel on the left-hand side which displays data impressions and loaded variables for your data.
• Composition Panel: the central window into which data impressions are dragged. Each set of data impressions + colormaps, glyphs, streamlines, etc. is called a “plate,” sticking with the printmaking metaphors. Use this panel like you would in Photoshop, adding visual elements as you see fit. More information on this can be found further along in this instructional guide.
• Design Palette: the panel on the right-hand side which displays all design options for the elements that comprise your visualization.

Expanded Visualization Vocabularies

ABR enables artists and designers to leverage their practices in the visualization space. This capability includes expanding the visual vocabulary of scientific visualization—redefining the visual components used in data representations in a shift toward human- and nature-made glyphs, textures, lines and colors. This shift shortens the distance between data and the natural phenomena they represent and opens new possibilities for visually distinguishing and communicating intra-variate dynamics in complex visualizations.

Hand-drawn and painted lines and line-components in the center of this image are applied to visualized Antarctic data, generated as data-mapped streamlines in ABR. The final visualizations can be seen on the far left and right of the image above.

Here, hand-sculpted glyphs create a wide variety of both shape and texture (center), which can be imported as data-mapped objects into ABR and used in complex, multivariate visualizations, such as those shown in the left and right images above.

By drawing color from natural imagery using ColorLoom, we can more effectively connect environmental data with the physical phenomena it represents, creating Affective visualizations that are intuitive and easy to parse. Here, the leftmost image shows an iPhone photo taken of the New Mexico landscape. The central image shows a palette of colors taken directly from the New Mexico landscape image. The rightmost image shows a visualization of Southern Ocean data using these colors.

Infinite Line

Infinite Line brings the physical artistic process into the visualization generation pipeline by allowing a user to sketch a line segment, upload an image of the sketch, and turn that sketch into a continuous, unbroken, patterned streamline. The output file can be dragged directly into ABR for immediate use.

Glyph Aligner

ColorLoom

ColorLoom allows a user to generate custom colormaps with hues automatically pulled from imported images. This applet gives users looking to design a custom colormap a dynamic starting point, and allows them to pull hues from imagery directly related to the dataset they are visualizing.

Texture Mapper

Texture Mapper shortens the space between the texture of the physical and digital worlds. A user may simply take a photo of any surface and upload that photo to texture mapper. The program automatically extracts the texture of the photo and produces a file output that can be dragged directly into ABR for immediate use as a texture for data surfaces in a visualization.

Resources

• Artifact Assets
• Artifact Library
• Code