Overview

Important Notes

• NO LECTURE ON TUESDAY, 22.12.2009!
• The lecture will start on Tuesday, 20. October.

Course Contents

Goals

Students will obtain a general overview of, and some basic knowledge about, visualization techniques, algorithms, and data structures as well as visual literacy and acquaintance with practical applications of visualization in science and engineering. Students will become proficient with practical aspects in a hands-on fashion by using existing visualization tools and applying them to example data from typical science and engineering disciplines (e.g. computational fluid dynamics, scanning devices, etc.).

Summary

Visualization deals with all aspects that are connected with the visual representation of data sets from scientific experiments, simulations, medical scanners, and the like in order to achieve a deeper understanding or a simpler representation of complex phenomena. To achieve this goal, both well-known techniques from the field of interactive computer graphics and completely new methods are applied. This course covers basic knowledge and practical applications of visualization by discussing the following topics:

• Course introduction, historical remarks
• Introductory visualization examples
• Visualization pipeline
• Basics of visual design and visual literacy
• Aspects of human visual perception (color perception, Gestalt principles)
• Data acquisition and representation (sampling and reconstruction; grids and data structures)
• Basic mapping concepts
• Visualization of scalar fields (isosurface extraction, volume rendering) and vector fields (particle tracing)
• Information visualization and statistical graphics

Throughout the course, visualization methods are applied to practical examples from science and engineering, such as volumetric visualization of 3D data, flow data from computational fluid dynamics, scanner data, etc.

Literature

Recommended books:

• C.D. Hansen, C.R. Johnson (eds.): The Visualization Handbook, Elsevier, 2005.
• C. Ware: Information Visualization, Morgan Kaufmann, 2nd edition, 2004.
• H. Schumann, W. Müller: Visualisierung. Grundlagen und allgemeine Methoden, Springer, 1999.
• J. Böhringer, P. Bühler, P. Schlaich: Kompendium der Mediengestaltung für Digital- und Printmedien, Springer, 2006.

Course Material

Updates and extensions of the course slides will be provided during the course of the lectures.

• Organizational introduction: 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 1 (Introduction and examples): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 2 (Visualization process): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 3 (Perception): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 4 (Basics of Visual Mapping): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 5 (Scalar Field Visualization): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 6 (Vector Field Visualization): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 7 (Tensor Field Visualization): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 8 (Information Visualization): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 9 (Data Storage, Organization, Interpolation): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page

Tutorial

Important Notes

• ASSIGNMENT 7 has been extended for one week and is due Monday, 25.01.2010.
• The next tutorial session after the winter holiday will be on Monday, 11. January 2010
• ASSIGNMENT 6 was the last assignment for 2009! Furthermore, there will be NO TUTORIAL ON MONDAY, 21. December! HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
• Assignments are due Mondays 9am from now on.
• There's no change in the schedule, the tutorial will continue to be held Mondays, 9:45 am.
• Get the access card and the login for the VIS-pool at the secretariat (room 1.453) before Monday, 2. November. For this, you need a form signed by Filip Sadlo (TTI building).
• New homework schedule: new assignments on Thursday, support on next Monday, due next Monday, discussion & presentation on same Monday.

Material

Updates and extensions of the tutorial slides will be provided during the course.

• Organizational introduction: 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 1 (Introduction): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 2 (Data Representation): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 3 (Interpolation and Differentiation) (updated 2009-12-14): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 4 (Scalar Fields) (updated 2010-01-12): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 5 (Vector Fields) (updated 2010-02-15): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page
• Chapter 6 (Tensor Fields) (updated 2010-02-15): 1 per page, 2 per page, 6 per page

Assignments

• Assignment 1: assignment, datafile for exercise 1.1, datafile for exercise 1.2 (right click and save)
• Assignment 2: assignment
  Covise 6.3 for OpenSuSE 10.3, pool license
  If you need to install Covise on another machine than those available in the pool, then please use the following license and DO NOT REQUEST ANY BY EMAIL: demo license (this license works until the end of the semester on any machine!)
  Crash Course and Tutorial
  exercise1_basic.net, grid.covise, pressure.covise, velocity.covise
• Assignment 3: assignment,FieldStatistics.zip
• Assignment 4: assignment,GridResample.tgz
  solution
• Assignment 5: assignment,FlowCriteria.tgz
• Assignemnt 6: assignment
• Assignment 7: assignment,MarchingCubes.zip
• Assignment 8: assignment
• Assignment 9: assignment,data.zip
• Assignment 10: assignment
• Assignment 11: assignment