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A Comparison of the Perceptual Benefits of Linear Perspective and Physically-Based Illumination for Display of Dense 3D Streamtubes
November/December 2008 (vol. 14 no. 6)
pp. 1723-1730
Chris Weigle, UT/ORNL Joint Institiute for Computational Sciences, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee
David Banks, UT/ORNL Joint Institiute for Computational Sciences, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee
Large datasets typically contain coarse features comprised of finer sub-features. Even if the shapes of the small structures are evident in a 3D display, the aggregate shapes they suggest may not be easily inferred. From previous studies in shape perception, the evidence has not been clear whether physically-based illumination confers any advantage over local illumination for understanding scenes that arise in visualization of large data sets that contain features at two distinct scales. In this paper we show that physically-based illumination can improve the perception for some static scenes of complex 3D geometry from flow fields. We perform human-subjects experiments to quantify the effect of physically-based illumination on participant performance for two tasks: selecting the closer of two streamtubes from a field of tubes, and identifying the shape of the domain of a flow field over different densities of tubes. We find that physically-based illumination influences participant performance as strongly as perspective projection, suggesting that physically-based illumination is indeed a strong cue to the layout of complex scenes. We also find that increasing the density of tubes for the shape identification task improved participant performance under physically-based illumination but not under the traditionalhardware-accelerated illumination model.
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Index Terms:
Index Terms—user study, volume completion, 3D shape perception, physically-based illumination, global illumination, local illumination, multi-scale visualization, flow visualization, streamtubes, DT-MRI, white matter tractography
Citation:
Chris Weigle, David Banks, "A Comparison of the Perceptual Benefits of Linear Perspective and Physically-Based Illumination for Display of Dense 3D Streamtubes," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 1723-1730, Nov./Dec. 2008, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2008.108
