Immersive Analytics Environment

Immersive Analytic Environment aims to create an immersive data analysis space based on VR technologes. In addition to visualization platforms for VR systems such as CAVE systems, head-mounted display systems, and tiled display systems, we are also investigating interface technologies to realize intuitive data analysis operations. These results are described below.

Multi-dimensional data visualization using 3D parallel coordinates for immersive analytic environment

In recent years, research on data analysis technology in highly immersive environments has been attracting attention. However, the effective use of information visualization technologies, which are often discussed on a two-dimensional space, and the development of embodied interactions for it are one of the most important issues need to be solved. In this research, we focus on parallel plane visualization technique for multi-dimensional data, and propose an immersive analysis environment that can efficiently and intuitively analyze the data by bundling the multiple line segments on the parallel planes using dimension reduction technology.

Related papers

田畑銀河, 坂本尚久, 三次元平行座標可視化技術を使った没入型視覚分析環境向け多次元データ可視化手法の提案, 第48回可視化情報シンポジウム, 7ページ, 2020.
田畑銀河, 坂本尚久, 三次元平行座標可視化技術を使った多次元データ向け没入型視覚分析環境の構築, 先進的可視化環境を用いた可視化情報の研究会（VR2019), 2020.

Intuitive interactions for immersive data exploration of numerical simulation results

Interactive visual analysis with intuitive operations for large-scale numerical simulation results has been one of the big challenges in visualization and simulation research fields. With the conventional technologies, the interaction is often handled by mouse, making the operations complicated and non-intuitive. Some highly immersive visualization environments using virtual reality (VR) technology, such as the CAVE system, have been developed, but come with a high cost. Fortunately, VR technology has been greatly advanced in these years. In this paper, we propose a new visualization system that enables interactive operations for the numerical simulation results, by using an immersive head-mounted display and intuitive operations to obtain new findings and insights effectively form such kind of dataset.

Related papers

Pierre Jarsaillon, Yu Han, Naohisa Sakamoto, Development of interactive visualization system for volume data using Head-Mounted Display, NICOGRAPH International 2017, (Poster), 2017.
Pierre J. Jarsaillon, Naohisa Sakamoto, and Akira Kageyama, “Flexible visualization framework for head-mounted display with gesture interaction interface”, International Journal of Modeling, Simulation, and Scientific Computing (IJMSSC), Vol. 9, Issue 3, (Online Ready), 2017.
Ginga Tabata, Naohisa Sakamoto, Takuma Kawamura, Intuitive Interaction for Immersive Data Exploration of Numerical Simulation Results, Proceedings of Joint International Conference on Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications + Monte Carlo 2020, p.193-200, 2020.

Development of support system for estimation of earthquake fault plane with hypocenter data

Effective data visualization techniques are required in order to support efficient earthquake analysis. So far, earthquake analysis experts have only been able to imagine 3D structures from typical 2D expressions. However, we consider that experts would be able to understand 3D structures more acculately and efficiently by providing them with an intuitive and interactive 3D display system. We focused on immersive projection technology (IPT) systems, more specifically on the CAVE system, to develop an effective support system for earthquake data analysis. We also developed an IPT oriented bimanual input based control interface for the support system to enable intuitive user interaction with the 3D display. In addition, we implemented a support tool for estimating fault planes in the earthquake phenomenon using the Spatio-Temporal Kriging method.

Related papers

Yukio Yasuhara, Naohisa Sakamoto, Yasuo Ebara, Hiroshi Katao, Koji Koyamada, Development of support system for estimation of earthquake fault plane with hypocenter data, Journal of Advanced Simulation in Science and Engineering, Vol.4, No.1, pp.132-142, 2018

Integrated rendering of volumes and semi-transparent polygons on a high-resolution display system

We propose a technique for semi-transparent rendering, which can integrally handle irregular volumes and polygons without visibility sorting. A projection technique for rendering of the irregular volumes requires a large memory space to calculate the visibility sorting at each viewing point. To solve the problem, we regard the brightness equation as the expected value of the luminosity of a sampling point along a viewing ray, and we propose a sorting-free approach that simply controls the fragment rendering by using the evaluated opacity value to calculate a rendered image. In our experiments, we applied our technique to several numerical simulation results and confirmed its effectiveness by rendering the volume with its semi-transparent boundary polygons and demonstrating the application of our technique to a high-resolution distributed display system.

Related papers

J.Nishimura, N.Sakamoto, K.Koyamada, Tiled Display Visualization System with Multi-touch Control, Proceedings of the Asia Simulation Conference 2011(AsiaSim2011), pp.492-497, 2011
J.Nishimura, N.Sakamoto, and K.Koyamada, Development of Multi-touch User Interface for Tiled Display Visualization System, International Conference on Modeling and Simulation Technology (JSST2011), 2011
Naohisa Sakamoto, Jun Nishimura, Koji Koyamada, Stochastic Approach for Integrated Rendering of Volumes and Semi-transparent polygons on a High-resolution Display System, The 5th IEEE PacificVis Symposium (Poster), 2012. Best Poster Award