Welcome to the Scientific Visualization Group

Scientific visualization provides graphical representations of numerical data for their qualitative and quantitative analysis. In contrast to a fully automatic analysis (e.g. with statistical methods), the final analytic step is left to the user, thus utilizing the power of the human visual system. Scientific visualization differs from the related field of information visualization in that it focuses on data that represent samples of continuous functions of space and time, as opposed to data that are inherently discrete.

The challenge in scientific visualization is to cope with massive data, which cannot be presented to the user in an unprocessed way for several reasons:

• Volumetric data, i.e. data given on a three-dimensional domain, occlude each other. This problem becomes even more severe if data are not scalars, but vectors or even tensors.
• Visualization should provide a global picture of the spatial and temporal behavior of the data, but also allow for interactive exploration of details.
• There can be multiple data (different physical quantities, multiple data channels, etc.) at each point in the domain.
• Visualization of scientific data should also include visualization of their uncertainty.
• The amount of raw data often exceeds limitations of processor speed, transfer rates, memory size, and display resolution.