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In this paper, we present a new workflow for the computer‐aided generation of physicalizations, addressing Nested configurations in anatomical and biological structures. Physicalizations are an important component of anatomical and biological education and edutainment. However, existing approaches have mainly revolved around creating data sculptures through digital fabrication. Only a few recent works proposed computer‐aided pipelines for generating sculptures, such as papercrafts, with affordable and readily available materials. Papercraft generation remains a Challenging topic by itself. Yet, anatomical and biological applications pose additional Challenges, such as reconstruction complexity and insufficiency to account for multiple, Nested structures—often present in anatomical and biological structures. Our workflow comprises the following steps: (i) define the Nested configuration of the model and detect its levels, (ii) calculate the viewpoint that provides optimal, unobstructed views on inner levels, (iii) perform cuts on the outer levels to reveal the inner ones based on the viewpoint selection, (iv) estimate the stability of the cut papercraft to ensure a reliable outcome, (v) generate textures at each level, as a smart visibility mechanism that provides additional information on the inner structures, and (vi) unfold each textured mesh guaranteeing reconstruction. Our novel approach exploits the interactivity of Nested papercraft models for edutainment purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Likert scales are often used in visualization evaluations to produce quantitative estimates of subjective attributes, such as ease of use or aesthetic appeal. However, the methods used to collect, analyze, and visualize data collected with Likert scales are inconsistent among evaluations in visualization papers. In this paper, we examine the use of Likert scales as a tool for measuring subjective response in a systematic review of 134 visualization evaluations published between 2009 and 2019. We find that papers with both objective and subjective measures do not hold the same reporting and analysis standards for both aspects of their evaluation, producing less rigorous work for the subjective qualities measured by Likert scales. Additionally, we demonstrate that many papers are inconsistent in their interpretations of Likert data as discrete or continuous and may even sacrifice statistical power by applying nonparametric tests unnecessarily. Finally, we identify instances where key details about Likert item construction with the potential to bias participant responses are omitted from evaluation methodology reporting, inhibiting the feasibility and reliability of future replication studies. We summarize recommendations from other fields for best practices with Likert data in visualization evaluations, based on the results of our survey. A full copy of this paper and all supplementary material are available at https://osf.io/exbz8/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual analytics systems integrate interactive visualizations and machine learning to enable expert users to solve complex analysis tasks. Applications combine techniques from various fields of research and are consequently not trivial to evaluate. The result is a lack of structure and comparability between evaluations. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of evaluations in the field of human‐centered machine learning. We particularly focus on human‐related factors that influence trust, interpretability, and explainability. We analyze the evaluations presented in papers from top conferences and journals in information visualization and human‐computer interaction to provide a systematic review of their setup and findings. From this survey, we distill design dimensions for structured evaluations, identify evaluation gaps, and derive future research opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a long period of scepticism, more and more publications describe basic research but also practical approaches to how abstract data can be presented in immersive environments for effective and efficient data understanding. Central aspects of this important research question in immersive analytics research are concerned with the use of 3D for visualization, the embedding in the immersive space, the combination with spatial data, suitable interaction paradigms and the evaluation of use cases. We provide a characterization that facilitates the comparison and categorization of published works and present a survey of publications that gives an overview of the state of the art, current trends, and gaps and challenges in current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the widespread applications of curves on n‐dimensional spheres, fitting curves on n‐dimensional spheres has received increasing attention in recent years. However, due to the non‐Euclidean nature of spheres, curve fitting methods on n‐dimensional spheres often struggle to balance fitting accuracy and curve fairness. In this paper, we propose a new fitting framework, GLS‐PIA, for parameterized point sets on n‐dimensional spheres to address the challenge. Meanwhile, we provide the proof of the method. Firstly, we propose a progressive iterative approximation method based on geodesic least squares which can directly optimize the geodesic least squares loss on the n‐sphere, improving the accuracy of the fitting. Additionally, we use an error allocation method based on contribution coefficients to ensure the fairness of the fitting curve. Secondly, we propose an adaptive knot placement method based on geodesic difference to estimate a more reasonable distribution of control points in the parameter domain, placing more control points in areas with greater detail. This enables B‐spline curves to capture more details with a limited number of control points. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves outstanding performance, especially in handling imbalanced data points. (In this paper, “sphere” refers to n‐sphere (n ≥ 2) unless otherwise specified.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing the detailed information embedded in rasterized floorplans is at the research forefront in the community of computer graphics and vision. With the advent of deep neural networks, automatic floorplan recognition has made tremendous breakthroughs. However, co‐recognizing both the structures and semantics of floorplans through one neural network remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework Raster‐to‐Graph, which automatically achieves structural and semantic recognition of floorplans. We represent vectorized floorplans as structural graphs embedded with floorplan semantics, thus transforming the floorplan recognition task into a structural graph prediction problem. We design an autoregressive prediction framework using the neural network architecture of the visual attention Transformer, iteratively predicting the wall junctions and wall segments of floorplans in the order of graph traversal. Additionally, we propose a large‐scale floorplan dataset containing over 10,000 real‐world residential floorplans. Our autoregressive framework can automatically recognize the structures and semantics of floorplans. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, showing significant improvements on all metrics. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations indicate that our framework outperforms existing state‐of‐the‐art methods. Code and dataset for this paper are available at: https://github.com/HSZVIS/Raster-to-Graph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As virtual worlds continue to rise in popularity, so do the expectations of users for the content of virtual scenes. Virtual worlds must be large in scope and offer enough freedom of movement to keep the audience occupied at all times. For content creators, it is difficult to keep up by manually producing the surrounding content. Therefore, the application of procedural modelling techniques is required. Virtual worlds often mimic the real world, which is composed of organized and connected outdoor and indoor layouts. It is expected that all content is present on the virtual scene and that a user can navigate streets, enter buildings, and interact with furniture within a single virtual world. While there are many procedural methods for generating different layout types, they mostly focus only on one layout type, whereas complete scene generation is greatly underrepresented. This paper aims to identify the coverage of layout types by different methods because similar issues exist for the generation of content of different layout types. When creating a new method for layout generation, it is important to know if the results of existing methods can be appended to other methods. This paper presents a survey of existing procedural modelling methods, which were organized into five categories based on the core approach: pure subdivision, grammar‐based, data‐driven, optimization, and simulation. Information about the covered layout types, the possibility of user interaction during the generation process, and the input and output shape types of the generated content is provided for each surveyed method. The input and output shape types of the generated content can be useful to identify which methods can continue the generation by using the output of other methods as their input. It was concluded that all surveyed methods work for only a few different layout types simultaneously. Moreover, only 35% of the surveyed methods offer interaction with the user after completing the initial process of space generation. Most existing approaches do not perform transformations of shape types. A significant number of methods use the irregular shape type as input and generate the same shape type as the output, which is sufficient for coverage of all layout types when generating a complete virtual world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an optimization approach for generating grid layouts from large data collections such that they are amenable to level‐of‐detail presentation and exploration. Classic (flat) grid layouts visually do not scale to large collections, yielding overwhelming numbers of tiny member representations. The proposed local search‐based progressive optimization scheme generates hierarchical grids: leaves correspond to one grid cell and represent one member, while inner nodes cover a quadratic range of cells and convey an aggregate of contained members. The scheme is solely based on pairwise distances and jointly optimizes for homogeneity within inner nodes and across grid neighbors. The generated grids allow to present and flexibly explore the whole data collection with arbitrary local granularity. Diverse use cases featuring large data collections exemplify the application: stock market predictions from a Black‐Scholes model, channel structures in soil from Markov chain Monte Carlo, and image collections with feature vectors from neural network classification models. The paper presents feedback by a domain scientist, compares against previous approaches, and demonstrates visual and computational scalability to a million members, surpassing classic grid layout techniques by orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypergraphs are a generalization of graphs in which edges (hyperedges) can connect more than two vertices—as opposed to ordinary graphs where edges involve only two vertices. Hypergraphs are a fairly common data structure but there is little consensus on how to visualize them. To optimize a hypergraph drawing for readability, we need a layout algorithm. Common graph layout algorithms only consider ordinary graphs and do not take hyperedges into account. We focus on layered hypergraphs, a particular class of hypergraphs that, like layered graphs, assigns every vertex to a layer, and the vertices in a layer are drawn aligned on a linear axis with the axes arranged in parallel. In this paper, we propose a general method to apply layered graph layout algorithms to layered hypergraphs. We introduce six different transformations for layered hypergraphs. The choice of transformation affects the subsequent graph layout algorithm in terms of computational performance and readability of the results. Thus, we perform a comparative evaluation of these transformations in terms of number of crossings, edge length, and impact on performance. We also provide two case studies showing how our transformations can be applied to real‐life use cases. A copy of this paper with all appendices and supplemental material is available at osf.io/grvwu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in critical information visualization have brought the field's attention to political, feminist, ethical, and rhetorical aspects of data visualization. However, less work has explored the interplay between design decisions and political ramifications—structures of authority, means of representation, etc. In this paper, we build upon these critical perspectives and highlight the political aspect of civic text visualization especially in the context of democratic decision‐making. Based on a critical analysis of survey papers about text visualization in general, followed by a review on the status quo of text visualization in civics, we argue that civic text visualization inherits an exclusively analytic framing. This framing leads to a series of issues and challenges in the fundamentally political context of civics, such as misinterpretation of data, missing minority voices, and excluding the public from decision making processes. To span this gap between political context and analytic framing, we provide a series of two‐pole conceptual dimensions, such as from singular user to multiple relationships, and from complexity to inclusivity of visualization design. For each dimension, we discuss how the tensions between these poles can help surface the political ramifications of design decisions in civic text visualization. These dimensions can thus help visualization researchers, designers, and practitioners attend more intentionally to these political aspects and inspire their design choices. We conclude by suggesting that these dimensions may be useful for visualization design across a variety of application domains, beyond civic text visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, it has been shown that the quality of GPU‐based trilinear volume resampling can be significantly improved if the six additional trilinear samples evaluated for the gradient estimation also contribute to the reconstruction of the underlying function [Csé19]. Although this improvement increases the approximation order from two to three without any extra cost, the continuity order remains C0. In this paper, we go one step further showing that a C1 continuous triquadratic B‐spline reconstruction and its analytic partial derivatives can be evaluated by taking only one more trilinear sample into account. Thus, our method is the first volume‐resampling technique that is nearly as fast as trilinear interpolation combined with on‐the‐fly central differencing, but provides a higher‐quality reconstruction together with a consistent analytic gradient calculation. Furthermore, we show that our fast evaluation scheme can also be adapted to the Mitchell‐Netravali [MN88] notch filter, for which a fast GPU implementation has not been known so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the inception of electronic health records (EHR) and population health records (PopHR), the volume of archived digital health records is growing rapidly. Large volumes of heterogeneous health records require advanced visualization and visual analytics systems to uncover valuable insight buried in complex databases. As a vibrant sub‐field of information visualization and visual analytics, many interactive EHR and PopHR visualization (EHR Vis) systems have been proposed, developed, and evaluated by clinicians to support effective clinical analysis and decision making. We present the state‐of‐the‐art (STAR) of EHR Vis literature and open access healthcare data sources and provide an up‐to‐date overview on this important topic. We identify trends and challenges in the field, introduce novel literature and data classifications, and incorporate a popular medical terminology standard called the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We provide a curated list of electronic and population healthcare data sources and open access datasets as a resource for potential researchers, in order to address one of the main challenges in this field. We classify the literature based on multidisciplinary research themes stemming from reoccurring topics. The survey provides a valuable overview of EHR Vis revealing both mature areas and potential future multidisciplinary research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even if the appearance and geometry of the human eye have been extensively studied during the last decade, the geometrical correlation between gaze direction, eyelids aperture and eyelids shape has not been empirically modeled. In this paper, we propose a data‐driven approach for capturing and modeling the subtle features of the human eye region, such as the inner eye corner and the skin bulging effect due to globe orientation. Our approach consists of an original experimental setup to capture the eye region geometry variations combined with a 3D reconstruction method. Regarding the eye region capture, we scanned 55 participants doing 36 eyes poses. To animate a participant's eye region, we register the different poses to a vertex wise correspondence before blending them in a trilinear fashion. We show that our 3D animation results are visually pleasant and realistic while bringing novel eye features compared to state of the art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes and evaluates a sketching language to author crowd motion. It focuses on the path, speed, thickness, and density parameters of crowd motion. A sketch‐based vocabulary is proposed for each parameter and evaluated in a user study against complex crowd scenes. A sketch recognition pipeline converts the sketches into a crowd simulation. The user study results show that 1) participants at various skill levels and can draw accurate crowd motion through sketching, 2) certain sketch styles lead to a more accurate representation of crowd parameters, and 3) sketching allows to produce complex crowd motions in a few seconds. The results show that some styles although accurate actually are less preferred over less accurate ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel second‐order explicit midpoint method to address the issue of energy loss and vorticity dissipation in Eulerian fluid simulation. The basic idea is to explicitly compute the pressure gradient at the middle time of each time step and apply it to the velocity field after advection. Theoretically, our solver can achieve higher accuracy than the first‐order solvers at similar computational cost. On the other hand, our method is twice and even faster than the implicit second‐order solvers at the cost of a small loss of accuracy. We have carried out a large number of 2D, 3D and numerical experiments to verify the effectiveness and availability of our algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the stability of the explicit material point method (MPM). We focus on PIC, APIC, and CPIC transfers using quadratic and cubic splines in two and three dimensions. We perform a fully three‐dimensional Von Neumann stability analysis to study the behavior within the bulk of a material. This reveals the relationship between the sound speed, CFL number, and actual time step restriction and its dependence on discretization options. We note that boundaries are generally less stable than the interior, with stable time steps generally decreasing until the limit when particles become isolated. We then analyze the stability of a single particle to derive a novel time step restriction that stabilizes simulations at their boundaries. Finally, we show that for explicit MPM with APIC or CPIC transfers, there are pathological cases where growth is observed at arbitrarily small time steps sizes. While these cases do not necessarily pose a problem for practical usage, they do suggest that a guarantee of stability may be theoretically impossible and that necessary but not sufficient time step restrictions may be a necessary and practical compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bubble diagrams serve as a crucial tool in the field of architectural planning and graphic design. With the surge of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), there has been a continuous emergence of research and development efforts focused on utilizing bubble diagrams for layout design and generation. However, there is a lack of research efforts focused on bubble diagram generation. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model, BubbleFormer, for generating diverse and plausible bubble diagrams. BubbleFormer consists of two improved Transformer networks: NodeFormer and EdgeFormer. These networks generate nodes and edges of the bubble diagram, respectively. To enhance the generation diversity, a VAE module is incorporated into BubbleFormer, allowing for the sampling and generation of numerous high‐quality bubble diagrams. BubbleFormer is trained end‐to‐end and evaluated through qualitative and quantitative experiments. The results demonstrate that BubbleFormer can generate convincing and diverse bubble diagrams, which in turn drive downstream tasks to produce high‐quality layout plans. The model also shows generalization capabilities in other layout generation tasks and outperforms state‐of‐the‐art techniques in terms of quality and diversity. In previous work, bubble diagrams as input are provided by users, and as a result, our bubble diagram generative model fills a significant gap in automated layout generation driven by bubble diagrams, thereby enabling an end‐to‐end layout design and generation. Code for this paper is at https://github.com/cgjiahui/BubbleFormer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artistic authoring of 3D environments is a laborious enterprise that also requires skilled content creators. There have been impressive improvements in using machine learning to address different aspects of generating 3D content, such as generating meshes, arranging geometry, synthesizing textures, etc. In this paper we develop a model to generate Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions (BRDFs) from descriptive textual prompts. BRDFs are four dimensional probability distributions that characterize the interaction of light with surface materials. They are either represented parametrically, or by tabulating the probability density associated with every pair of incident and outgoing angles. The former lends itself to artistic editing while the latter is used when measuring the appearance of real materials. Numerous works have focused on hypothesizing BRDF models from images of materials. We learn a mapping from textual descriptions of materials to parametric BRDFs. Our model is first trained using a semi‐supervised approach before being tuned via an unsupervised scheme. Although our model is general, in this paper we specifically generate parameters for MDL materials, conditioned on natural language descriptions, within NVIDIA's Omniverse platform. This enables use cases such as real‐time text prompts to change materials of objects in 3D environments such as "dull plastic" or "shiny iron". Since the output of our model is a parametric BRDF, rather than an image of the material, it may be used to render materials using any shape under arbitrarily specified viewing and lighting conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ninety‐degree pop‐ups are a type of papercraft on which a three‐dimensional (3D) structure pops up when the angle of the base fold is 90°. They are fabricated by cutting and creasing a single sheet of paper. Traditional 90° pop‐ups are limited to 3D shapes only comprising planar shapes because they are made of paper. In this paper, we present novel pop‐ups, fabricatable 90° pop‐ups that employ the 90° pop‐up mechanism, consist of components with curved shapes, and can be fabricatable using a 3D printer. We propose a method for converting a 3D model into a fabricatable 90° pop‐up. The user first interactively designs a layout of pop‐up components, and the system automatically deforms the components using the 3D model. Because the generated pop‐ups contain necessary cuts and folds, no additional assembly process is required. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, we designed and fabricated various 90° pop‐ups using a 3D printer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at obtaining structural information and 3D motion of dynamic scenes, scene flow estimation has been an interest of research in computer vision and computer graphics for a long time. It is also a fundamental task for various applications such as autonomous driving. Compared to previous methods that utilize image representations, many recent researches build upon the power of deep analysis and focus on point clouds representation to conduct 3D flow estimation. This paper comprehensively reviews the pioneering literature in scene flow estimation based on point clouds. Meanwhile, it delves into detail in learning paradigms and presents insightful comparisons between the state‐of‐the‐art methods using deep learning for scene flow estimation. Furthermore, this paper investigates various higher‐level scene understanding tasks, including object tracking, motion segmentation, etc. and concludes with an overview of foreseeable research trends for scene flow estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational models, such as simulations, are central to a wide range of fields in science and industry. Those models take input parameters and produce some output. To fully exploit their utility, relations between parameters and outputs must be understood. These include, for example, which parameter setting produces the best result (optimization) or which ranges of parameter settings produce a wide variety of results (sensitivity). Such tasks are often difficult to achieve for various reasons, for example, the size of the parameter space, and supported with visual analytics. In this paper, we survey visual parameter space exploration (VPSE) systems involving spatial and temporal data. We focus on interactive visualizations and user interfaces. Through thematic analysis of the surveyed papers, we identify common workflow steps and approaches to support them. We also identify topics for future work that will help enable VPSE on a greater variety of computational models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys visualization and interaction techniques for geospatial networks from a total of 95 papers. Geospatial networks are graphs where nodes and links can be associated with geographic locations. Examples can include social networks, trade and migration, as well as traffic and transport networks. Visualizing geospatial networks poses numerous challenges around the integration of both network and geographical information as well as additional information such as node and link attributes, time and uncertainty. Our overview analyses existing techniques along four dimensions: (i) the representation of geographical information, (ii) the representation of network information, (iii) the visual integration of both and (iv) the use of interaction. These four dimensions allow us to discuss techniques with respect to the trade‐offs they make between showing information across all these dimensions and how they solve the problem of showing as much information as necessary while maintaining readability of the visualization. https://geonetworks.github.io. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a novel approach for real‐time rendering of soft eclipse shadows cast by spherical, atmosphereless bodies. While this problem may seem simple at first, it is complicated by several factors. First, the extreme scale differences and huge mutual distances of the involved celestial bodies cause rendering artifacts in practice. Second, the surface of the Sun does not emit light evenly in all directions (an effect which is known as limb darkening). This makes it impossible to model the Sun as a uniform spherical light source. Finally, our intended applications include real‐time rendering of solar eclipses in virtual reality, which require very high frame rates. As a solution to these problems, we precompute the amount of shadowing into an eclipse shadow map, which is parametrized so that it is independent of the position and size of the occluder. Hence, a single shadow map can be used for all spherical occluders in the Solar System. We assess the errors introduced by various simplifications and compare multiple approaches in terms of performance and precision. Last but not least, we compare our approaches to the state‐of‐the‐art and to reference images. The implementation has been published under the MIT license. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shape recovery quality of photometric stereo is sensitive to complicated error factors under close range lighting of quasi‐point lights. However, the error performance of photometric stereo under this practical scenario is still obscure. This paper presents a comprehensive error analysis of photometric stereo with near quasi‐point lights (NQPL‐PS). Five main error factors are identified under this scenario and their corresponding analytical formulations are introduced. Statistic computation and experiments are used to validate the theoretical formulations and inspect the relationships between normal inaccuracies and each type of discrepancies. In addition, the impacts of multiple system parameters of an NQPL‐PS configuration on the normal estimation error are also studied. In order to evaluate the relative importance of various error factors, a probability‐based evaluation criterion is proposed, which focuses on the error performance over the state space and the error space, rather than the simple comparison of the values of normal inaccuracy. The assessment results show that the non‐uniformity of illuminants, and the calibration error in the position of light sources hold the dominant places among those five error factors. This paper provides insights for the accuracy improvement and system design of NQPL‐PS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, researchers have proposed several approaches for building floorplans using parametric/generative design, shape grammars, machine learning, AI, etc. This paper aims to demonstrate a mathematical approach for the automated generation of floorplan layouts. Mathematical formulations warrant the fulfilment of all input user constraints, unlike the learning‐based methods present in the literature. Moreover, the algorithms illustrated in this paper are robust, scalable and highly efficient, generating thousands of floorplans in a few milliseconds. We present G2PLAN, a software based on graph‐theoretic and linear optimization techniques, that generates all topologically distinct floorplans with different boundary rooms in linear time for given adjacency and dimensional constraints. G2PLAN builds on the work of GPLAN and offers solutions to a wider range of adjacency relations (one‐connected, non‐triangulated graphs) and better dimensioning customizability. It also generates a catalogue of dimensionless as well as dimensioned floorplans satisfying user requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a state‐of‐the‐art report on visualization in astrophysics. We survey representative papers from both astrophysics and visualization and provide a taxonomy of existing approaches based on data analysis tasks. The approaches are classified based on five categories: data wrangling, data exploration, feature identification, object reconstruction, as well as education and outreach. Our unique contribution is to combine the diverse viewpoints from both astronomers and visualization experts to identify challenges and opportunities for visualization in astrophysics. The main goal is to provide a reference point to bring modern data analysis and visualization techniques to the rich datasets in astrophysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical representations of data offer physical and spatial ways of looking at, navigating, and interacting with data. While digital fabrication has facilitated the creation of objects with data‐driven geometry, rendering data as a physically fabricated object is still a daunting leap for many physicalization designers. Rendering in the scope of this research refers to the back‐and‐forth process from digital design to digital fabrication and its specific challenges. We developed a corpus of example data physicalizations from research literature and physicalization practice. This survey then unpacks the "rendering" phase of the extended InfoVis pipeline in greater detail through these examples, with the aim of identifying ways that researchers, artists, and industry practitioners "render" physicalizations using digital design and fabrication tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visualizations are now widely used across disciplines to understand and communicate data. The benefit of visualizations lies in leveraging our natural visual perception. However, the sole dependency on vision can produce unintended discrimination against people with visual impairments. While the visualization field has seen enormous growth in recent years, supporting people with disabilities is much less explored. In this work, we examine approaches to support this marginalized user group, focusing on visual disabilities. We collected and analyzed papers published for the last 20 years on visualization accessibility. We mapped a design space for accessible visualization that includes seven dimensions: user group, literacy task, chart type, interaction, information granularity, sensory modality, assistive technology. We described the current knowledge gap in light of the latest advances in visualization and presented a preliminary accessibility model by synthesizing findings from existing research. Finally, we reflected on the dimensions and discussed opportunities and challenges for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading books or articles digitally has become accessible and widespread thanks to the large amount of affordable mobile devices and distribution platforms. However, little effort has been devoted to improving the digital book reading experience, despite studies showing disadvantages of digital text media consumption, such as diminished memory recall and enjoyment, compared to physical books. In addition, a vast amount of physical, printed books of interest exist, many of them rare and not easily physically accessible, such as out‐of‐print art books, first editions, or historical tomes secured in museums. Digital replicas of such books are typically either purely text based, or consist of photographed pages, where much of the essence of leafing through and experiencing the actual artifact is lost. In this work, we devise a method to recreate the experience of reading and interacting with a physical book in a digital 3D environment. Leveraging recent work on static modeling of freeform developable surfaces, which exhibit paper‐like properties, we design a method for dynamic physical simulation of such surfaces, accounting for gravity and handling collisions to simulate pages in a book. We propose a mix of 2D and 3D models, specifically tailored to represent books to achieve a computationally fast simulation, running in real time on mobile devices. Our system enables users to lift, bend and flip book pages by holding them at arbitrary locations and provides a holistic interactive experience of a virtual 3D book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Task‐incremental learning (Task‐IL) aims to enable an intelligent agent to continuously accumulate knowledge from new learning tasks without catastrophically forgetting what it has learned in the past. It has drawn increasing attention in recent years, with many algorithms being proposed to mitigate neural network forgetting. However, none of the existing strategies is able to completely eliminate the issues. Moreover, explaining and fully understanding what knowledge and how it is being forgotten during the incremental learning process still remains under‐explored. In this paper, we propose KnowledgeDrift, a visual analytics framework, to interpret the network forgetting with three objectives: (1) to identify when the network fails to memorize the past knowledge, (2) to visualize what information has been forgotten, and (3) to diagnose how knowledge attained in the new model interferes with the one learned in the past. Our analytical framework first identifies the occurrence of forgetting by tracking the task performance under the incremental learning process and then provides in‐depth inspections of drifted information via various levels of data granularity. KnowledgeDrift allows analysts and model developers to enhance their understanding of network forgetting and compare the performance of different incremental learning algorithms. Three case studies are conducted in the paper to further provide insights and guidance for users to effectively diagnose catastrophic forgetting over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design studies are an integral method of visualization research with hundreds of instances in the literature. Although taught as a theory, the practical implementation of design studies is often excluded from visualization pedagogy due to the lengthy time commitments associated with such studies. Recent research has addressed this challenge and developed an expedited design study framework, the Design Study "Lite" Methodology (DSLM), which can implement design studies with novice students within just 14 weeks. The framework was developed and evaluated based on five semesters of in‐person data visualization courses with 30 students or less and was implemented in conjunction with Service‐Learning (S‐L). With the growth and popularity of the data visualization field—and the teaching environment created by the COVID‐19 pandemic—more academic institutions are offering visualization courses online. Therefore, in this paper, we strengthen and validate the epistemological foundations of the DSLM framework by testing its (1) adaptability to online learning environments and conditions and (2) scalability to larger classes with up to 57 students. We present two online implementations of the DSLM framework, with and without Service‐Learning (S‐L), to test the adaptability and scalability of the framework. We further demonstrate that the framework can be applied effectively without the S‐L component. We reflect on our experience with the online DSLM implementations and contribute a detailed retrospective analysis using thematic analysis and grounded theory methods to draw valuable recommendations and guidelines for future applications of the framework. This work verifies that DSLM can be used successfully in online classes to teach design study methodology. Finally, we contribute novel additions to the DSLM framework to further enhance it for teaching and learning design studies in the classroom. The preprint and supplementary materials for this paper can be found at https://osf.io/6bjx5/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information visualizations such as bar charts and line charts are very common for analyzing data and discovering critical insights. Often people analyze charts to answer questions that they have in mind. Answering such questions can be challenging as they often require a significant amount of perceptual and cognitive effort. Chart Question Answering (CQA) systems typically take a chart and a natural language question as input and automatically generate the answer to facilitate visual data analysis. Over the last few years, there has been a growing body of literature on the task of CQA. In this survey, we systematically review the current state‐of‐the‐art research focusing on the problem of chart question answering. We provide a taxonomy by identifying several important dimensions of the problem domain including possible inputs and outputs of the task and discuss the advantages and limitations of proposed solutions. We then summarize various evaluation techniques used in the surveyed papers. Finally, we outline the open challenges and future research opportunities related to chart question answering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operational demands in safety‐critical systems impose a risk of failure to the operators especially during urgent situations. Operators of safety‐critical systems learn to make decisions effectively throughout extensive training programs and many years of experience. In the domain of air traffic control, expensive training with high dropout rates calls for research to enhance novices' ability to detect and resolve conflicts in the airspace. While previous researchers have mostly focused on redesigning training instructions and programs, the current paper explores possible benefits of novel visual representations to improve novices' understanding of the situations as well as their decision‐making process. We conduct an experimental evaluation study testing two ecological visual analytics interfaces, developed in a previous study, as support systems to facilitate novice decision‐making. The main contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we describe the application of an ecological interface design approach to the development of two visual analytics interfaces. Second, we perform a human‐in‐the‐loop experiment with forty‐five novices within a simplified air traffic control simulation environment. Third, by performing an expert‐novice comparison we investigate the extent to which effects of the proposed interfaces can be attributed to the subjects' expertise. The results show that the proposed ecological visual analytics interfaces improved novices' understanding of the information about conflicts as well as their problem‐solving performance. Further, the results show that the beneficial effects of the proposed interfaces were more attributable to the visual representations than the users' expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key time steps selection, i.e., selecting a subset of most representative time steps, is essential for effective and efficient scientific visualization of large time‐varying volume data. In particular, as computer simulations continue to grow in size and complexity, they often generate output that exceeds both the available storage capacity and bandwidth for transferring results to storage, making it indispensable to save only a subset of time steps. At the same time, this subset must be chosen so that it is highly representative, to facilitate post‐processing and reconstruction with high fidelity. The key time steps selection problem is especially challenging in the in situ setting, where we can only process data in one pass in an online streaming fashion, using a small amount of main memory and fast computation. In this paper, we formulate the problem as that of optimal piece‐wise linear interpolation. We first apply a method from numerical linear algebra to compute linear interpolation solutions and their errors in an online streaming fashion. Using that method as a building block, we can obtain a global optimal solution for the piece‐wise linear interpolation problem via a standard dynamic programming (DP) algorithm. However, this approach needs to process the time steps in multiple passes and is too slow for the in situ setting. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approximation algorithm, which processes time steps in one pass in an online streaming fashion, with very efficient computing time and main memory space both in theory and in practice. The algorithm is suitable for the in situ setting. Moreover, we prove that our algorithm, which is based on a greedy update rule, has strong theoretical guarantees on the approximation quality and the number of time steps stored. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm suitable for in situ key time steps selection with such theoretical guarantees, and is the main contribution of this paper. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our new techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B EuroVis 2021 b B 23rd Eurographics Conference on Visualization 2021 b Zurich, Switzerland (Virtual Conference) June 14 - 18, 2021 GLO:BNX/01jun21:cgf14328-gra-0001.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): . gl B General Chairs b Renato Pajarola, University of Zürich, Switzerland Tobias Günther, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany B Full Papers Chairs b Rita Borgo, King's College London, UK G. Elisabeta Marai, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Tatiana von Landesberger, University of Cologne and University of Rostock, Germany B STARs Chairs b Noeska Smit, University of Bergen, Norway Katerina Vrotsou, Linköping University, Sweden Bei Wang, University of Utah, USA B Short Papers Chairs b Marco Agus, Hamad bin Khalifa University, Qatar Christoph Garth, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany Andreas Kerren, Linnaeus University, Sweden B Posters Chairs b Jan Byska, Masaryk University, Czech Republic and University of Bergen, Norway Stefan Jänicke, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark Johanna Schmidt, VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH, Austria B Workshop Chair b Jürgen Bernard, University of Zurich, Switzerland Sponsors GLO:BNX/01jun21:cgf14328-gra-0002.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): . gl Preface EuroVis 2021, the Eurographics / IEEE VGTC Conference on Visualization was scheduled to be held in Zürich, Switzerland from June 14 to June 18th, 2021. We were looking forward to bringing the international data visualization community together at the conference in Zürich. EuroVis also covers the theory of visualization, hardware acceleration, large datasets, perception, interaction, user studies, information visualization, visual analytics, and many application areas of visualization. [Extracted from the article]

Recent advances in machine learning have led to increased interest in solving visual computing problems using methods that employ coordinate‐based neural networks. These methods, which we call neural fields, parameterize physical properties of scenes or objects across space and time. They have seen widespread success in problems such as 3D shape and image synthesis, animation of human bodies, 3D reconstruction, and pose estimation. Rapid progress has led to numerous papers, but a consolidation of the discovered knowledge has not yet emerged. We provide context, mathematical grounding, and a review of over 250 papers in the literature on neural fields. In Part I, we focus on neural field techniques by identifying common components of neural field methods, including different conditioning, representation, forward map, architecture, and manipulation methods. In Part II, we focus on applications of neural fields to different problems in visual computing, and beyond (e.g., robotics, audio). Our review shows the breadth of topics already covered in visual computing, both historically and in current incarnations, and highlights the improved quality, flexibility, and capability brought by neural field methods. Finally, we present a companion website that acts as a living database that can be continually updated by the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The real‐time simulation of human crowds has many applications. In a typical crowd simulation, each person ('agent') in the crowd moves towards a goal while adhering to local constraints. Many algorithms exist for specific local 'steering' tasks such as collision avoidance or group behavior. However, these do not easily extend to completely new types of behavior, such as circling around another agent or hiding behind an obstacle. They also tend to focus purely on an agent's velocity without explicitly controlling its orientation. This paper presents a novel sketch‐based method for modelling and simulating many steering behaviors for agents in a crowd. Central to this is the concept of an interaction field (IF): a vector field that describes the velocities or orientations that agents should use around a given 'source' agent or obstacle. An IF can also change dynamically according to parameters, such as the walking speed of the source agent. IFs can be easily combined with other aspects of crowd simulation, such as collision avoidance. Using an implementation of IFs in a real‐time crowd simulation framework, we demonstrate the capabilities of IFs in various scenarios. This includes game‐like scenarios where the crowd responds to a user‐controlled avatar. We also present an interactive tool that computes an IF based on input sketches. This IF editor lets users intuitively and quickly design new types of behavior, without the need for programming extra behavioral rules. We thoroughly evaluate the efficacy of the IF editor through a user study, which demonstrates that our method enables non‐expert users to easily enrich any agent‐based crowd simulation with new agent interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectral geometric methods have brought revolutionary changes to the field of geometry processing. Of particular interest is the study of the Laplacian spectrum as a compact, isometry and permutation‐invariant representation of a shape. Some recent works show how the intrinsic geometry of a full shape can be recovered from its spectrum, but there are approaches that consider the more challenging problem of recovering the geometry from the spectral information of partial shapes. In this paper, we propose a possible way to fill this gap. We introduce a learning‐based method to estimate the Laplacian spectrum of the union of partial non‐rigid 3D shapes, without actually computing the 3D geometry of the union or any correspondence between those partial shapes. We do so by operating purely in the spectral domain and by defining the union operation between short sequences of eigenvalues. We show that the approximated union spectrum can be used as‐is to reconstruct the complete geometry [MRC*19], perform region localization on a template [RTO*19] and retrieve shapes from a database, generalizing ShapeDNA [RWP06] to work with partialities. Working with eigenvalues allows us to deal with unknown correspondence, different sampling, and different discretizations (point clouds and meshes alike), making this operation especially robust and general. Our approach is data‐driven and can generalize to isometric and non‐isometric deformations of the surface, as long as these stay within the same semantic class (e.g., human bodies or horses), as well as to partiality artifacts not seen at training time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simulating crowds requires controlling a very large number of trajectories of characters and is usually performed using crowd steering algorithms. The question of choosing the right algorithm with the right parameter values is of crucial importance given the large impact on the quality of results. In this paper, we study the performance of a number of steering policies (i.e., simulation algorithm and its parameters) in a variety of contexts, resorting to an existing quality function able to automatically evaluate simulation results. This analysis allows us to map contexts to the performance of steering policies. Based on this mapping, we demonstrate that distributing the best performing policies among characters improves the resulting simulations. Furthermore, we also propose a solution to dynamically adjust the policies, for each agent independently and while the simulation is running, based on the local context each agent is currently in. We demonstrate significant improvements of simulation results compared to previous work that would optimize parameters once for the whole simulation, or pick an optimized, but unique and static, policy for a given global simulation context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthesizing novel views of dynamic humans from stationary monocular cameras is a specialized but desirable setup. This is particularly attractive as it does not require static scenes, controlled environments, or specialized capture hardware. In contrast to techniques that exploit multi‐view observations, the problem of modeling a dynamic scene from a single view is significantly more under‐constrained and ill‐posed. In this paper, we introduce Neural Motion Consensus Flow (MoCo‐Flow), a representation that models dynamic humans in stationary monocular cameras using a 4D continuous time‐variant function. We learn the proposed representation by optimizing for a dynamic scene that minimizes the total rendering error, over all the observed images. At the heart of our work lies a carefully designed optimization scheme, which includes a dedicated initialization step and is constrained by a motion consensus regularization on the estimated motion flow. We extensively evaluate MoCo‐Flow on several datasets that contain human motions of varying complexity, and compare, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to several baselines and ablated variations of our methods, showing the efficacy and merits of the proposed approach. Pretrained model, code, and data will be released for research purposes upon paper acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Günther is the recipient of an impressive number of important awards, such as the EUROGRAPHICS PhD Thesis Award, IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) Dissertation Award, Best Paper Award at TopoInVis, as well as Best Paper Honorable Mentions at EUROGRAPHICS and IEEE Visualization. Eurographics Young Researcher Award 2021: Tobias Günther GLO:BNX/01may21:cgf14257-gra-0007.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): . gl Tobias Günther is awarded the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award 2021. Keynotes Replicating Reality Dieter W. Fellner https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7756-0901 TU Darmstadt & Fraunhofer IGD, Germany Graz University of Technology, Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualization, Austria GLO:BNX/01may21:cgf14257-gra-0009.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): . gl Biography Dieter Fellner is a Professor for Computer Science at Graz University of Technology and at TU Darmstadt, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD (located in Darmstadt, Rostock and Singapore) and CEO of Fraunhofer Austria (located in Vienna and Graz). [Extracted from the article]

In machine learning and computer graphics, a fundamental task is the approximation of a probability density function through a well‐dispersed collection of samples. Providing a formal metric for measuring the distance between probability measures on general spaces, Optimal Transport (OT) emerges as a pivotal theoretical framework within this context. However, the associated computational burden is prohibitive in most real‐world scenarios. Leveraging the simple structure of OT in 1D, Sliced Optimal Transport (SOT) has appeared as an efficient alternative to generate samples in Euclidean spaces. This paper pushes the boundaries of SOT utilization in computational geometry problems by extending its application to sample densities residing on more diverse mathematical domains, including the spherical space 핊d, the hyperbolic plane ℍd, and the real projective plane ℙd. Moreover, it ensures the quality of these samples by achieving a blue noise characteristic, regardless of the dimensionality involved. The robustness of our approach is highlighted through its application to various geometry processing tasks, such as the intrinsic blue noise sampling of meshes, as well as the sampling of directions and rotations. These applications collectively underscore the efficacy of our methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generating realistic animated virtual humans is a problem that has been extensively studied with many applications in different types of virtual environments. However, the creation process of such realistic animations is challenging, especially because of the number and variety of influencing factors, that should then be identified and evaluated. In this paper, we attempt to provide a clearer understanding of how the multiple factors that have been studied in the literature impact the level of realism of animated virtual humans, by providing a survey of studies assessing their realism. This includes a review of features that have been manipulated to increase the realism of virtual humans, as well as evaluation approaches that have been developed. As the challenges of evaluating animated virtual humans in a way that agrees with human perception are still active research problems, this survey further identifies important open problems and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Point‐based radiance field rendering has demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis, offering a compelling blend of rendering quality and computational efficiency. However, also latest approaches in this domain are not without their shortcomings. 3D Gaussian Splatting [KKLD23] struggles when tasked with rendering highly detailed scenes, due to blurring and cloudy artifacts. On the other hand, ADOP [RFS22] can accommodate crisper images, but the neural reconstruction network decreases performance, it grapples with temporal instability and it is unable to effectively address large gaps in the point cloud. In this paper, we present TRIPS (Trilinear Point Splatting), an approach that combines ideas from both Gaussian Splatting and ADOP. The fundamental concept behind our novel technique involves rasterizing points into a screen‐space image pyramid, with the selection of the pyramid layer determined by the projected point size. This approach allows rendering arbitrarily large points using a single trilinear write. A lightweight neural network is then used to reconstruct a hole‐free image including detail beyond splat resolution. Importantly, our render pipeline is entirely differentiable, allowing for automatic optimization of both point sizes and positions.Our evaluation demonstrate that TRIPS surpasses existing state‐of‐the‐art methods in terms of rendering quality while maintaining a real‐time frame rate of 60 frames per second on readily available hardware. This performance extends to challenging scenarios, such as scenes featuring intricate geometry, expansive landscapes, and auto‐exposed footage. The project page is located at: https://lfranke.github.io/trips [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most real‐time rendering models for atmospheric effects have been designed and optimized for Earth's atmosphere. Some authors have proposed approaches for rendering other atmospheres, but these methods still use approximations that are only valid on Earth. For instance, the iconic blue glow of Martian sunsets can not be represented properly as the complex interference effects of light scattered at dust particles can not be captured by these approximations. In this paper, we present an approach for generalizing an existing model to make it capable of rendering extraterrestrial atmospheres. This is done by replacing the approximations with a physical model based on Mie Theory. We use the particle‐size distribution, the particle‐density distribution as well as the wavelength‐dependent refractive index of atmospheric particles as input. To demonstrate the feasibility of this idea, we extend the model by Bruneton et al. [BN08] and implement it into CosmoScout VR, an open‐source visualization of our Solar System. In a first step, we use Mie Theory to precompute the scattering behaviour of a particle mixture. Then, multi‐scattering is simulated, and finally the precomputation results are used for real‐time rendering. We demonstrate that this not only improves the visualization of the Martian atmosphere, but also creates more realistic results for our own atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of visual computing is rapidly advancing due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which unlocks unprecedented capabilities for the generation, editing, and reconstruction of images, videos, and 3D scenes. In these domains, diffusion models are the generative AI architecture of choice. Within the last year alone, the literature on diffusion‐based tools and applications has seen exponential growth and relevant papers are published across the computer graphics, computer vision, and AI communities with new works appearing daily on arXiv. This rapid growth of the field makes it difficult to keep up with all recent developments. The goal of this state‐of‐the‐art report (STAR) is to introduce the basic mathematical concepts of diffusion models, implementation details and design choices of the popular Stable Diffusion model, as well as overview important aspects of these generative AI tools, including personalization, conditioning, inversion, among others. Moreover, we give a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on diffusion‐based generation and editing, categorized by the type of generated medium, including 2D images, videos, 3D objects, locomotion, and 4D scenes. Finally, we discuss available datasets, metrics, open challenges, and social implications. This STAR provides an intuitive starting point to explore this exciting topic for researchers, artists, and practitioners alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration in extended reality (XR) environments presents complex challenges that revolve around how users perceive the presence, intentions, and actions of their collaborators. This paper delves into the intricate realm of group awareness, focusing specifically on workspace awareness and the innovative visual cues designed to enhance user comprehension. The research begins by identifying a spectrum of collaborative situations drawn from an analysis of XR prototypes in the existing literature. Then, we describe and introduce a novel classification for workspace awareness, along with an exploration of visual cues recently employed in research endeavors. Lastly, we present the key findings and shine a spotlight on promising yet unexplored topics. This work not only serves as a reference for experienced researchers seeking to inform the design of their own collaborative XR applications but also extends a welcoming hand to newcomers in this dynamic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Full‐body avatar presence is important for immersive social and environmental interactions in digital reality. However, current devices only provide three six degrees of freedom (DOF) poses from the headset and two controllers (i.e. three‐point trackers). Because it is a highly under‐constrained problem, inferring full‐body pose from these inputs is challenging, especially when supporting the full range of body proportions and use cases represented by the general population. In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework, DivaTrack, which outperforms existing methods when applied to diverse body sizes and activities. We augment the sparse three‐point inputs with linear accelerations from Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) to improve foot contact prediction. We then condition the otherwise ambiguous lower‐body pose with the predictions of foot contact and upper‐body pose in a two‐stage model. We further stabilize the inferred full‐body pose in a wide range of configurations by learning to blend predictions that are computed in two reference frames, each of which is designed for different types of motions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our design on a large dataset that captures 22 subjects performing challenging locomotion for three‐point tracking, including lunges, hula‐hooping, and sitting. As shown in a live demo using the Meta VR headset and Xsens IMUs, our method runs in real‐time while accurately tracking a user's motion when they perform a diverse set of movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a computational framework for modeling land parcels and streets. In the real world, parcels and streets are highly coupled with each other since a street network connects all the parcels in a certain area. However, existing works model parcels and streets separately to simplify the problem, resulting in urban layouts with irregular parcels and/or suboptimal streets. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical approach to co‐generate parcels and streets from a user‐specified polygonal land shape, guided by a set of fundamental urban design requirements. At each hierarchical level, new parcels are generated based on binary splitting of existing parcels, and new streets are subsequently generated by leveraging efficient graph search tools to ensure that each new parcel has a street access. At the end, we optimize the geometry of the generated parcels and streets to further improve their geometric quality. Our computational framework outputs an urban layout with a desired number of regular parcels that are reachable via a connected street network, for which users are allowed to control the modeling process both locally and globally. Quantitative comparisons with state‐of‐the‐art approaches show that our framework is able to generate parcels and streets that are superior in some aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]