ITR Collaborative Research: Perceptual Optimization for Data Visualization

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Much of human intelligence can be broadly characterized as the ability to identify patterns and the visual system is the most sophisticated pattern finding mechanism that we have. Of all of our Perceptual systems, vision dominates. It is estimated to engage 50% of the cortex and 70% of all our sensory receptors are visual, but is only just becoming possible to display as much information as the human visual system is capable of absorbing. The proposed research has the following five elements: a) A display that supports real-time animation at the limit of the resolution of the human visual system, b) The development and evaluation of perceptually near-optimal solutions through the development of human-in-the-loop optimization techniques, c) A set of experiments that will measure the efficiency of different ways of displaying common information structures, including paths in graphs, aspects of flow patterns, and the shapes of overlapping surfaces, d) The development of algorithms that support the mapping between data attributes and visual display primitives in a flexible adaptive or tunable process, e) The application of the techniques to visualization problems in three areas: flow visualization, overlaying surface visualization and large network visualization. The intellectual merit of the proposed research will be to firmly establish information psychophysics and define the field as an intellectual endeavor thereby combining existing techniques into a cohesive discipline. The high- resolution display will enable researchers to work at the limits of human perceptual capability endowing the results with long-term value.The broader impacts of the proposed research will include design guidelines, immediately useable design solutions, as well as algorithms and information display theory. Material contributions will be made in the following areas: flow visualization, network visualization, and overlapping surface visualization.