|
|
|
This project develops new visualization evaluation methodologies, an area that has only begun to be addressed. And it compares the effectiveness of visualization applications in several interactive and static computing and display environments including a 4-wall Cave, a 40'x40' virtual environment with a head mounted display, stereo head-tracked workbenches, desktop workstations, paper, and 3D rapid-prototyping output. Immersive environments will be studied because the value of these non-traditional working environments has not been established and because they present an opportunity to explore fundamentally different interaction metaphors. Comparisons will be performed for both interactive and static cases with appropriate technology determined for each application.
This project brings together experience from art and perceptual psychology for inspiration. Through several centuries, artists have evolved a tradition of techniques to create visual representations for particular communication goals. Art history provides a language for understanding that knowledge. We will draw inspiration from painting, sculpture, drawing, and graphic design and apply these techniques to the scientific problems.
Beyond inspiration, perceptual psychology also brings a second set of knowledge to bear on scientific visualization problems. Evaluating the effectiveness of visualization methods is difficult because, not only are the goals difficult to define and codify, tests that evaluate them meaningfully are difficult to design and execute. These evaluations are akin to evaluating how the human perceptual system works. Perceptual psychologists have been developing experiments for understanding perception for decades, and they will help develop methodology and expertise for evaluating visualization methods in close collaboration with biologists, fluids researchers, geographers, artists, and computer scientists.
While many of the individual components of this project are important alone, the collaborative aspects are the most notable. Mining ideas from art and perception will suggest unusually innovative visualization ideas. The application of new visualization techniques and collaboration with researchers in other fields will provide us with a unique opportunity to validate the techniques and ensure that they are responsive to the needs of the scientific problems. Because the techniques will be developed with application to multiple disciplines, they are likely to find further application within these and other disciplines. The assembled team brings strengths in all of the disciplines and has already demonstrated a track record of collaborative work.
The broader impact of the proposed research lies not only in the information technology arena, where new methods will help scientists in many disciplines to more effectively interact with and understand their data and gain insight about the physical phenomena they represent, but also in the specific scientific domains we will study. The study of blood flow could lead to improved understanding of and treatment for cardiovascular pathologies. An understanding of early neural development could enable new therapies for birth defects, genetic disorders, and other diseases. Remote sensing advances could provide more effective resource monitoring and permit widespread improvements in global quality of life.
Today, the pace of surgical innovations has increased dramatically, yet the mechanisms for training and re-training suffer from inflexible timing, extended time commitments, and limited content. Traditional videotaped instruction has long been available to help surgeons learn new procedures, but this approach is only marginally effective due to the fixed point of view that is integral to the narration, lack of depth perception and interactivity, and missing information; in short, the experience of watching a video is not sufficiently close to being there and seeing the procedure.
In this project the PI will develop a new paradigm for teaching surgical procedures that allows surgeons to witness and explore (in time and space) a past surgical procedure as if they were there, with the added benefit of instruction from the original surgeon or another instructor, as well as integrated 3D illustrations, annotations, and relevant medical metadata. The trainees should be able to freely and naturally walk around a life-sized, high-fidelity, 3D graphical reconstruction of the original time-varying events, pausing or stepping forward and backward in time to satisfy curiosity or allay confusion. To make this reality, the PI and his team bring together experts in several disciplines, and will be able to collectively leverage their prior work in tele-immersion, time-varying 3D scene capture, interaction metaphors, "cinematic" techniques. and authoring tools.
Brown Daily Herald: http://www.browndailyherald.com/stories.cfm?ID=5631
Brown news release: http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-048.html
George Street Journal: http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol26/26GSJ08f.html
NSF press release: http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/01/pr0174.htm
NSF Award Description: http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=0121657
| home | people | information | publications | research | outreach | sponsors | search |
|
|
