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We propose an efficient method to model paper tearing in the context of interactive modeling. The method uses geometrical information to automatically detect potential starting points of tears. We further introduce a new hybrid geometrical and physical-based method to compute the trajectory of tears while procedurally synthesizing high resolution details of the tearing path using a texture based approach. The results obtained are compared with real paper and with previous studies on the expected geometric paths of paper that tears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Paper pop-ups are interesting three-dimensional books that fascinate people of all ages. The design and construction of these pop-up books however are done manually and require a lot of time and effort. This has led to computer-assisted or automated tools for designing paper pop-ups. This paper proposes an approach for automatically converting a 3D model into a multi-style paper pop-up. Previous automated approaches have only focused on single-style pop-ups, where each is made of a single type of pop-up mechanisms. In our work, we combine multiple styles in a pop-up, which is more representative of actual artist's creations. Our method abstracts a 3D model using suitable primitive shapes that both facilitate the formation of the considered pop-up mechanisms and closely approximate the input model. Each shape is then abstracted using a set of 2D patches that combine to form a valid pop-up. We define geometric conditions that ensure the validity of the combined pop-up structures. In addition, our method also employs an image-based approach for producing the patches to preserve the textures, finer details and important contours of the input model. Finally, our system produces a printable design layout and decides an assembly order for the construction instructions. The feasibility of our results is verified by constructing the actual paper pop-ups from the designs generated by our system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel appearance model for paper. Based on our appearance measurements for matte and glossy paper, we find that paper exhibits a combination of subsurface scattering, specular reflection, retroreflection, and surface sheen. Classic microfacet and simple diffuse reflection models cannot simulate the double-sided appearance of a thin layer. Our novel BSDF model matches our measurements for paper and accounts for both reflection and transmission properties. At the core of the BSDF model is a method for converting a multi-layer subsurface scattering model (BSSRDF) into a BSDF, which allows us to retain physically-based absorption and scattering parameters obtained from the measurements. We also introduce a method for computing the amount of light available for subsurface scattering due to transmission through a rough dielectric surface. Our final model accounts for multiple scattering, single scattering, and surface reflection and is capable of rendering paper with varying levels of roughness and glossiness on both sides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information visualization as a field is growing rapidly in popularity since the first information visualization conference in 1995. However, as a consequence of its growth, it is increasingly difficult to follow the growing body of literature within the field. Survey papers and literature reviews are valuable tools for managing the great volume of previously published research papers, and the quantity of survey papers in visualization has reached a critical mass. To this end, this survey paper takes a quantum step forward by surveying and classifying literature survey papers in order to help researchers understand the current landscape of Information Visualization. It is, to our knowledge, the first survey of survey papers (SoS) in Information Visualization. This paper classifies survey papers into natural topic clusters which enables readers to find relevant literature and develops the first classification of classifications. The paper also enables researchers to identify both mature and less developed research directions as well as identify future directions. It is a valuable resource for both newcomers and experienced researchers in and outside the field of Information Visualization and Visual Analytics. [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]

This paper attempts to explain the mechanics of writing a research paper in visualization. This serves as a useful starting point for those who have never written a research paper before or have very little previous experience. After all, no one is born knowing how to write one. And yet, there are certain elements, a commonality, that should be found in virtually all good visualization research papers. We give our recommendations as to each section a good research paper consists of as well as what each section contains. This paper itself follows our recommended structure. We believe that paper writing should start with the abstract. The abstract can be approximately 6-12 sentences. It is a difficult starting point, but it forces the author to write down a concise description of what they are researching and what the benefits are. Chances are, if the author cannot start out by writing an abstract, then it is not clear in the author's mind what the paper should be about. Of course, the abstract will be refined and updated during the paper writing process. The abstract should concisely (1) identify the research topic, (2) describe the novelty of the presented work and (3) identify the benefits and advantages that result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewing literatures for a certain research field is always important for academics. One could use Google-like information seeking tools, but oftentimes he/she would end up obtaining too many possibly related papers, as well as the papers in the associated citation network. During such a process, a user may easily get lost after following a few links for searching or cross-referencing. It is also difficult for the user to identify relevant/important papers from the resulting huge collection of papers. Our work, called PaperVis, endeavors to provide a user-friendly interface to help users quickly grasp the intrinsic complex citation-reference structures among a specific group of papers. We modify the existing Radial Space Filling (RSF) and Bullseye View techniques to arrange involved papers as a node-link graph that better depicts the relationships among them while saving the screen space at the same time. PaperVis applies visual cues to present node attributes and their transitions among interactions, and it categorizes papers into semantically meaningful hierarchies to facilitate ensuing literature exploration. We conduct experiments on the InfoVis 2004 Contest Dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of PaperVis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel and effective method for modeling a developable surface to simulate paper bending in interactive and animation applications. The method exploits the representation of a developable surface as the envelope of rectifying planes of a curve in 3D, which is therefore necessarily a geodesic on the surface. We manipulate the geodesic to provide intuitive shape control for modeling paper bending. Our method ensures a natural continuous isometric deformation from a piece of bent paper to its flat state without any stretching. Test examples show that the new scheme is fast, accurate, and easy to use, thus providing an effective approach to interactive paper bending. We also show how to handle non-convex piecewise smooth developable surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents models for graphite pencil, drawing paper, blenders, and kneaded eraser that produce realistic looking pencil marks, textures, and tones. Our models are based on an observation of how lead pencils interact with drawing paper, and on the absorptive and dispersive properties of blenders and erasers interacting with lead material deposited over drawing paper. The models consider parameters such as the particle composition of the lead, the texture of the paper, the position and shape of the pencil materials, and the pressure applied to them. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach with a variety of images and compare them to digitized pencil drawings. We also present image-based rendering results implementing traditional graphite pencil tone rendering methods. [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]

Information about the proceedings of the Technical Papers Program of European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics) 2015 held in Zurich, Switzerland, from May 4-8, 2015 is presented. Topics include reviews of papers focusing on rebuttal and misinterpretations, and gratutude to advisory board members Marc Alexa for their help in the paper sorting. It further reveals that technical paper selection process involved experts from International Programme Committee.

Constructing a 3D papercraft model from its unfolding has been fun for both children and adults since we can reproduce virtual 3D models in the real world. However, facilitating the papercraft construction process is still a challenging problem, especially when the shape of the input model is complex in the sense that it has large variation in its surface curvature. This paper presents a new heuristic approach to unfolding 3D triangular meshes without any shape distortions, so that we can construct the 3D papercraft models through simple atomic operations for gluing boundary edges around the 2D unfoldings. Our approach is inspired by the concept of topological surgery, where the appearance of boundary edges of the unfolded closed surface can be encoded using a symbolic representation. To fully simplify the papercraft construction process, we developed a genetic-based algorithm for unfolding the 3D mesh into a single connected patch in general, while optimizing the usage of the paper sheet and balance in the shape of that patch. Several examples together with user studies are included to demonstrate that the proposed approach works well for a broad range of 3D triangular meshes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a physically inspired model of wax crayons, which synthesizes drawings from collections of user-specified strokes. Paper is represented by a height-field texture, and a crayon is modeled with a 2D mask that evolves as it interacts with the paper. The amount of wax deposition is computed based on the crayon contact profile, contact force and friction. Previously deposited wax is smeared by crayon action, based on wax softness and contact information. Deposited wax can also be carved from the paper by the crayon and redeposited at another location. The distributed wax is rendered using a simplified Kubelka–Monk model, which approximates light transmission and scattering effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on selected papers from the 18th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The paper "A Randomized Approach for Patch-based Texture Synthesis Using Wavelets" by Leandro Tonietto, Marcelo Walter and Claudio R. Jung, discusses a wavelet-based approach for selecting blocks in patch-based texture synthesis. The second paper was "GEncode: Geometry-driven Compression for General Meshes" by Thomas Lewiner and colleagues.

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]

Eurographics '99 Announcement, page 287. Eurographics &99 Call for Participation, page 289. Joint EG-IEEE TCCG Symposium on Visualization - Call for Papers, page 293. 5th EG Workshop on Virtual Environments - Call for Papers, page 296. 10th EG Workshop on rendering - Call for Participation, page 298. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information on the journal "Computer Graphics Forum" is presented, including its editorial staff, subscription rates and copyright.

Papercraft models can serve as inexpensive prototypes in shape design applications. However, in making the models some geometric detail is necessarily lost, and artificial creases may be visible, thereby limiting the utility of these models. To compensate for these practical limitations, we introduce the use of printed patterns on papercraft models to enhance the perception of the shape they are intended to represent. We propose pattern generation schemes that modulate the sizes, directions, and densities of glyphs of patterns based on geometric attributes. We present a psychophysical experiment designed to explore the effect that printed patterns have on the perception of the papercraft model shapes. We find that models with printed patterns are perceived to represent the intended shape more accurately, and, further, that the type of printed pattern has an impact on the perceived shape. [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]

During the last decades, anatomy has become an interesting topic in education—even for laymen or schoolchildren. As medical imaging techniques become increasingly sophisticated, virtual anatomical education applications have emerged. Still, anatomical models are often preferred, as they facilitate 3D localization of anatomical structures. Recently, data physicalizations (i.e., physical visualizations) have proven to be effective and engaging—sometimes, even more than their virtual counterparts. So far, medical data physicalizations involve mainly 3D printing, which is still expensive and cumbersome. We investigate alternative forms of physicalizations, which use readily available technologies (home printers) and inexpensive materials (paper or semi‐transparent films) to generate crafts for anatomical edutainment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first computer‐generated crafting approach within an anatomical edutainment context. Our approach follows a cost‐effective, simple, and easy‐to‐employ workflow, resulting in assemblable data sculptures (i.e., semi‐transparent sliceforms). It primarily supports volumetric data (such as CT or MRI), but mesh data can also be imported. An octree slices the imported volume and an optimization step simplifies the slice configuration, proposing the optimal order for easy assembly. A packing algorithm places the resulting slices with their labels, annotations, and assembly instructions on a paper or transparent film of user‐selected size, to be printed, assembled into a sliceform, and explored. We conducted two user studies to assess our approach, demonstrating that it is an initial positive step towards the successful creation of interactive and engaging anatomical physicalizations. [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]

Announces several events organized by the Eurographics Association.

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]

We propose a generic pigment model suitable for digital painting in a wide range of genres including traditional Chinese painting and water-based painting. The model embodies a simulation of the pigment-water solution and its interaction with the brush and the paper at the level of pigment particles; such a level of detail is needed for achieving highly intricate effects by the artist. The simulation covers pigment diffusion and sorption processes at the paper surface, and aspects of pigment particle deposition on the paper. We follow rules and formulations from quantitative studies of adsorption and diffusion processes in surface chemistry and the textile industry. The result is a pigment model that spans a continuum from the very wet to the very dry brush stroke effects. We also propose a new pigment mixing method based on machine learning techniques to emulate pigment mixing in real life as well as to support the creation of new artificial pigments. To experiment with the proposed model, we embedded the model in a sophisticated digital brush system. The combined system exhibits interactive speed on a modest PC platform. provides supplementary materials for this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a real-time rendering method for single-bounce glossy caustics created by GGX microsurfaces. Our method is based on stochastic light culling of virtual point lights (VPLs), which is an unbiased culling method that randomly determines the range of influence of light for each VPL. While the original stochastic light culling method uses a bounding sphere defined by that light range for coarse culling (e.g., tiled culling), we have further extended the method by calculating a tighter bounding ellipsoid for glossy VPLs. Such bounding ellipsoids can be calculated analytically under the classic Phong reflection model which cannot be applied to physically plausible materials used in modern computer graphics productions. In order to use stochastic light culling for such modern materials, this paper derives a simple analytical solution to generate a tighter bounding ellipsoid for VPLs on GGX microsurfaces. This paper also presents an efficient implementation for culling bounding ellipsoids in the context of tiled culling. When stochastic light culling is combined with interleaved sampling for a scene with tens of thousands of VPLs, this tiled culling is faster than conservative rasterization-based clustered shading which is a state-of-the-art culling technique that supports bounding ellipsoids. Using these techniques, VPLs are culled efficiently for completely dynamic single-bounce glossy caustics reflected from GGX microsurfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an interactive system for ink splattering, a form of abstract art that artists splat ink onto the canvas. The default input device of our system is a pressure-sensitive 2D stylus, the most common sketching tool for digital artists, and we propose two interaction mode: ink-flicking mode and ink-dripping mode, that are designed to be analogous to the artistic techniques of ink splattering in real world. The core of our ink splattering system is a novel three-stage ink splattering framework that simulates the physics-based interaction of ink with different mediums including brush heads, air and paper. We have implemented the physical engine in CUDA and the whole simulation process runs at interactive speed. [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]

Abstract: Visualization researchers have been increasingly leveraging crowdsourcing approaches to overcome a number of limitations of controlled laboratory experiments, including small participant sample sizes and narrow demographic backgrounds of study participants. However, as a community, we have little understanding on when, where, and how researchers use crowdsourcing approaches for visualization research. In this paper, we review the use of crowdsourcing for evaluation in visualization research. We analyzed 190 crowdsourcing experiments, reported in 82 papers that were published in major visualization conferences and journals between 2006 and 2017. We tagged each experiment along 36 dimensions that we identified for crowdsourcing experiments. We grouped our dimensions into six important aspects: study design & procedure, task type, participants, measures & metrics, quality assurance, and reproducibility. We report on the main findings of our review and discuss challenges and opportunities for improvements in conducting crowdsourcing studies for visualization research. [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]

Researchers in non-photorealistic rendering have investigated the display of three-dimensional worlds using various display models. In particular, recent work has focused on the modeling of traditional artistic media and styles such as pen-and-ink illustration and watercolor painting. By providing 3D rendering systems that use these alternative display models users can generate traditional illustration renderings of their three-dimensional worlds. In this paper we present our graphite pencil 3D renderer. We have broken the problem of simulating pencil drawing down into four fundamental parts: (1) simulating the drawing materials (graphite pencil and drawing paper, blenders and kneaded eraser), (2) modeling the drawing primitives (individual pencil strokes and mark-making to create tones and textures), (3) simulating the basic rendering techniques used by artists and illustrators familiar with pencil rendering, and (4) modeling the control of the drawing composition. Each part builds upon the others and is essential to developing the framework for higher-level rendering methods and tools. In this paper we present parts 2, 3, and 4 of our research. We present non-photorealistic graphite pencil rendering methods for outlining and shading. We also present the control of drawing steps from preparatory sketches to finished rendering results. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach with a variety of images generated from 3D models. [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]

Machine learning (ML) models are nowadays used in complex applications in various domains, such as medicine, bioinformatics, and other sciences. Due to their black box nature, however, it may sometimes be hard to understand and trust the results they provide. This has increased the demand for reliable visualization tools related to enhancing trust in ML models, which has become a prominent topic of research in the visualization community over the past decades. To provide an overview and present the frontiers of current research on the topic, we present a State‐of‐the‐Art Report (STAR) on enhancing trust in ML models with the use of interactive visualization. We define and describe the background of the topic, introduce a categorization for visualization techniques that aim to accomplish this goal, and discuss insights and opportunities for future research directions. Among our contributions is a categorization of trust against different facets of interactive ML, expanded and improved from previous research. Our results are investigated from different analytical perspectives: (a) providing a statistical overview, (b) summarizing key findings, (c) performing topic analyses, and (d) exploring the data sets used in the individual papers, all with the support of an interactive web‐based survey browser. We intend this survey to be beneficial for visualization researchers whose interests involve making ML models more trustworthy, as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in their search for effective visualization techniques suitable for solving their tasks with confidence and conveying meaning to their data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]