ALBERT

Description: Although head-mounted displays (HMDs) are ideal devices for personal viewing of immersive stereoscopic content, exposure to VR applications on them results in significant discomfort for the majority of people, with symptoms including eye fatigue, headaches, nausea, and sweating. A conflict between accommodation and vergence depth cues on stereoscopic displays is a significant cause of visual discomfort. This article describes the results of an evaluation used to judge the effectiveness of dynamic depth-of-field (DoF) blur in an effort to reduce discomfort caused by exposure to stereoscopic content on HMDs. Using a commercial game engine implementation, study participants report a reduction of visual discomfort on a simulator sickness questionnaire when DoF blurring is enabled. The study participants reported a decrease in symptom severity caused by HMD exposure, indicating that dynamic DoF can effectively reduce visual discomfort.

Description: Audra Geras combines a long-term love for the intricate complexities of nature and artistic passion in her biomedical art business. Her clients range from advertising agencies to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Depicting a bioscape or environment, such as microscopic organisms or synaptic networks that few have seen or imagined, provides tremendous potential for creativity.

Description: The authors take a closer look at how the visualization community has discussed visual storytelling and present a visual data storytelling process, incorporating steps involved in finding insights (explore data), turning these insights into a narrative (make a story), and communicating this narrative to an audience (tell a story). They also discuss opportunities for future research in visualization as a storytelling medium in the light of this broader process.

Description: An experimental model animates contiguous computer cartograms by distorting the topological lengths of their edges. Using traffic information for the city of Lisbon, the authors distort a road map to depict traffic velocities. Areas of the city distend when velocities are low and compress when velocities are high. This model is applied to two visualizations: a trajectory visualization of vehicles, creating a temperature map for traffic velocities, and a figurative visualization that portrays Lisbon as a system of pulsing blood vessels. The proposed model can efficiently generate and animate edge-based cartograms with low representation errors.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Description: Marker tracking is used in numerous applications. Depending on the context and its constraints, tracking accuracy can be a crucial component of the application. This article first explains that the tracking accuracy depends on the illumination, which is not controlled in most applications. In particular, the authors show how corner detection can shift several pixels when lighting or background context change, even if the camera and the marker are static. Based on cross-ratio invariance, the proposed method helps reestimate the corner extraction so that the marker model's cross ratio corresponds to the one computed from the extracted corners in the image. The authors show on real data that their approach improves tracking accuracy, particularly along the camera depth axis, up to several millimeters, depending on the marker depth.

Description: Thumb-to-finger tap interaction can be employed to perform eyes-free, discrete, symbolic input in virtual and augmented reality environments. The DigiTap device is worn on the wrist to keep the hand free from any instrumentation so as not to impair tactile sense and dexterity. DigiTap senses the jerk that is caused by a tap and takes an image sequence to detect the tap location. The device can recognize taps at 12 different locations on the fingers, and at some positions, it can even distinguish between different tap strengths. The authors conducted an extended user study to evaluate users' abilities to interact with the device and perform symbolic input.

Description: Shape articulation transforms a lifeless geometric object into a vibrant character. Computers enrich artists' toolsets dramatically. They not only endow artists with the power to manipulate virtual 2D and 3D scenes, but they also eliminate tedium and expedite prototyping, freeing artists to focus on creative aspects. With such power comes a temptation to lean entirely on the computer. Computationally intensive animation systems sacrifice real-time feedback for physical accuracy. How can we leverage modern computational power to create the best possible shape deformations while maintaining real-time performance as a mandatory invariant? This article summarizes efforts to answer this, culminating in a deformation system with the quality of slow, nonlinear optimization, but at lightning speed.

Description: In undergraduate practical courses, it is common to work with groups of 100 or more students. These large-scale courses bring their own challenges. For example, course problems are too small and lack "the big picture"; grading becomes burdensome and repetitive for the teaching staff; and it is difficult to detect cheating. Based on their experience with a traditional large-scale practical course in image processing, the authors developed a novel course approach to teaching "Introduction to Digital Image Processing" (or EDBV, from the German course title Einführung in die Digitale Bild-Verarbeitung) for all undergraduate students of media informatics and visual computing and medical informatics at the TU Wien.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Description: Usability evaluations are important to improving handheld augmented reality (HAR) systems. However, no standard questionnaire considers perceptual and ergonomic issues found in HAR. The authors performed a systematic literature review to enumerate these issues. Based on these issues, they created a HAR usability scale that consists of comprehensibility and manipulability scales. These scales measure general system usability, ease of understanding the information presented, and ease of handling the device. The questionnaires' validity and reliability were evaluated in four experiments, and the results show that the questionnaires consistently correlate with other subjective and objective measures of usability. The questionnaires also have good reliability based on the Cronbach's alpha. Researchers and professionals can directly use these questionnaires to evaluate their own HAR applications or modify them with the insights presented in this article.

Description: Shape displays are an emerging class of devices that emphasize actuation to enable rich physical interaction, complementing concepts in virtual and augmented reality. The ability to render form introduces new opportunities to touch, grasp, and manipulate dynamic physical content and tangible objects, in both nearby and remote environments. This article presents novel hardware, interaction techniques, and applications, which point to the potential for extending the ways that we traditionally interact with the physical world, empowered by digital computation.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Description: This article features some of the latest advances and applications in computer graphics technology.

Description: This article describes a simple course exercise to deepen the understanding of real-time shadow mapping algorithms. The exercise takes less than 10 minutes to perform during lecture time, leads to a profounder understanding of the topic, and serves as a basis for further discussions of improvements for the shadow mapping algorithm. Using this exercise, the authors noticed an increase in implementing shadow algorithms for later real-time graphics projects.

Description: Having begun her artistic career using brushes, canvases, tubes of paint, and all the proprietary components of those disciplines, May/June 2015 CG&A artist Aurelia Zack spent 14 years managing a commercial graphics and exhibits studio. Now working full time as a digital artist on her own, she enjoys exploring duotone imagery and abstract representations made possible by software programs and rendering techniques.

Description: Detection of outliers and anomalous behavior is a well-known problem in the data mining and statistics fields. Although the problem of identifying single outliers has been extensively studied in the literature, little effort has been devoted to detecting small groups of outliers that are similar to each other but markedly different from the entire population. Many real-world scenarios have small groups of outliers--for example, a group of students who excel in a classroom or a group of spammers in an online social network. In this article, the authors propose a novel method to solve this challenging problem that lies at the frontiers of outlier detection and clustering of similar groups. The method transforms a multidimensional dataset into a graph, applies a network metric to detect clusters, and renders a representation for visual assessment to find rare events. The authors tested the proposed method to detect pathologic cells in the biomedical science domain. The results are promising and confirm the available ground truth provided by the domain experts.

Description: A robotic system can be considered a computer with the capacity to interact with the real world using sensors and actuators. This article reports on the authors' experiences in developing novel user interfaces for robotic systems, especially in the home environment. High-level control methods that use gestural or speech commands are overly ambiguous or excessively detailed for daily use. The proposed approach is to apply techniques developed in the human-computer interaction field, such as augmented reality and tangible user interfaces, to human-robot interaction. The authors introduce prototype systems such as home appliance control methods using augmented reality, a paper-based method for instructing mobile robots, and various I/O devices to enhance physical interaction with robotic systems. They then discuss lessons learned and directions for future research based on their experiences building these prototype robotic systems and interfaces.

Description: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

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Description: Although splines have been in popular use in CAD for more than half a century, spline research is still an active field, driven by the challenges we are facing today within isogeometric analysis and big data. Splines are likely to play a vital future role in enabling effective big data exploration techniques in 3D, 4D, and beyond.

Description: Alvaro Ocampo traversed many landscapes to arrive at his current space in the digital art landscape. Eventually, the artist then made his way to the digital world, where he is no longer subjected to the tyranny of the one-off. He believes digital art is the new version of traditional etching in the way that it eliminates the idea of the one original piece of art.

Description: Just as notebook computers once freed us to take our computers with us, smartphones freed us to walk around with computers in our pockets, and wearables will soon free us from needing to hold a screen at all. Today, as high-quality virtual and augmented reality begins to become available at consumer prices, the "screen" will soon be all around us. But the largest long-term impact here may not merely be one of form factor, but rather one of language itself. Once wearables become small enough, cheap enough, and therefore ubiquitous enough to be accepted as part of our everyday reality, our use of language will evolve in important ways.

Description: Volcanic eruptions are not only hazardous in the direct vicinity of a volcano, but they also affect the climate and air travel for great distances. This article sheds light on the Grímsvötn, Puyehue-Cordón Caulle, and Nabro eruptions in 2011. The authors study the agreement of the complementary satellite data, reconstruct sulfate aerosol and volcanic ash clouds, visualize endangered flight routes, minimize occlusion in particle trajectory visualizations, and focus on the main pathways of Nabro's sulfate aerosol into the stratosphere. The results here were developed for the 2014 IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest, which centers around the fusion of multiple satellite data modalities to reconstruct and assess the movement of volcanic ash and sulfate aerosol emissions. Using data from three volcanic eruptions that occurred in the span of approximately three weeks, the authors study the agreement of the complementary satellite data, reconstruct sulfate aerosol and volcanic ash clouds, visualize endangered flight routes, minimize occlusion in particle trajectory visualizations, and focus on the main pathways of sulfate aerosol into the stratosphere. This video provides animations of the reconstructed ash clouds. https://youtu.be/D9DvJ5AvZAs.

Description: The healthcare industry's widespread digitization efforts are reshaping one of the largest sectors of the world's economy. This transformation is enabling systems that promise to use ever-improving data-driven evidence to help doctors make more precise diagnoses, institutions identify at risk patients for intervention, clinicians develop more personalized treatment plans, and researchers better understand medical outcomes within complex patient populations. Given the scale and complexity of the data required to achieve these goals, advanced data visualization tools have the potential to play a critical role. This article reviews a number of visualization challenges unique to the healthcare discipline.

Description: Rock Stars of Big Data House Advertisement

Description: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications editor in chief Gabriel Taubin welcomes the magazine's incoming EIC Miguel Encarnação and bids farewell to editorial-board members David Kasik, Kari Pulli, and Diego Gutierrez.

Description: The winners of the 2012 IEEE Visualization Contest combined methods from molecular, flow, and scalar data visualization to reveal the characteristics and processes in the contest data. Because the simulated material didn't behave according to theory from textbooks, one challenge was to find meaningful visualizations to facilitate exploratory analysis. The contest winners created an interactive visual-analysis application based on MegaMol, their visualization framework. The tailored visualizations revealed data characteristics such as thermal vibrations and the spatial distribution of polarization domains. Domain expert knowledge verified the results. This video at http://youtu.be/RXnNKekY7VE shows the dataset used and the development of vector clusters over time.

Description: The next generation of VR simulators could take into account a novel input: the user's mental state, as measured with electrodes and a brain-computer interface. One illustration of this promising path is a project that adapted a guidance system's force feedback to the user's mental workload in real time. A first application of this approach is a medical training simulator that provides virtual assistance that adapts to the trainee's mental activity. Such results pave the way to VR systems that will automatically reconfigure and adapt to their users' mental states and cognitive processes.

Description: In conventional vehicle teleoperation systems, using low-bandwidth, high-delay transmission links causes a serious problem for remote control of the vehicles. To solve this problem, a proposed teleoperation system employs 3D maps and GPS time synchronization. Two GPS receivers measure the transmission delay, which the system uses to estimate the vehicle's location and orientation. Field experiments show that the 3D-map-based interface lets users easily comprehend the remote environment while navigating a vehicle. The experiments also show that taking communication delays into account improves maneuverability.

Description: IEEE Cloud Computing Seeks Editor in Chief House Advertisement

Description: This special issue features three articles on interactive 3D developments for the Web. Two articles discuss exploiting GPU ubiquity and performance; the other applies current Web3D languages to a real-world education challenge.

Description: Until recently, a major drawback of declarative-3D approaches for the Web was the encoding of scene-graph-related structured data along with a text-based description of unstructured vertex data. Loading times were long, and 3D Web content wasn't available until the full page had completely loaded. To overcome this limitation requires external mesh data containers that are referenced in the scene description. In particular, sequential image geometry containers and explicit binary containers align well with GPU buffer structures, thus enabling fast decoding and GPU uploads. Furthermore, progressive binary geometry enables simple, yet highly progressive transmission of arbitrary mesh data on the Web.

Description: This issue's article examines the digital artwork of Michael Frank.

Description: Image retargeting adjusts images to arbitrary sizes such that they can be viewed on different displays. Content-aware image retargeting has been receiving increased attention. In particular, researchers have improved a patch-wise scaling method for image retargeting at the object level. The scaling partitions the image into rectangular patches of adaptive sizes, which are comparable to the sizes of the salient objects in the image. This partitioning is based on a visual-saliency map; accordingly, the method labels the patches as important or unimportant. Then, the method scales the important patches as uniformly as possible and stretches or squeezes the unimportant patches to fit the target size. A patch-based image-similarity measure finds the optimal set of scaling factors. In experiments, the improved method performed well for three image types: lines and edges, foreground objects, and geometric structures.

Description: The LiverAnatomyExplorer is a real-time surgical teaching tool based on state-of-the-art Web technologies such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), X3D (Extensible3D), and WebGL (Web Graphics Library). Unlike other medical e-learning systems, the LiverAnatomyExplorer combines traditional clinical 2D imagery with interactive Web-based 3D models derived from patient-specific image data. The tool is enhanced by surgical videos, a self-assessment tool, and an online authoring tool with which instructors can manage the presented case studies and create multiple-choice quizzes.

Description: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Editor in Chief Gabriel Taubin welcomes Pak Chung Wong as the magazine's associate editor in chief for special issues. The Web extra thanks our many reviewers for all their hard work in 2012.

Description: This article takes a look at the computer-based artwork of Lynne Medsker.

Description: The emerging field of game user research (GUR) investigates interaction between players and games and the surrounding context of play. Game user researchers have explored methods from, for example, human-computer interaction, psychology, interaction design, media studies, and the social sciences. They've extended and modified these methods for different types of digital games, such as social games, casual games, and serious games. This article focuses on quantitative analytics of in-game behavioral user data and its emergent use by the GUR community. The article outlines open problems emerging from several GUR workshops. In addition, a case study of a current collaboration between researchers and a game company demonstrates game analytics' use and benefits.

Description: Public-display installations can range from large-scale media facades that are embedded in architectural structures and that people can interact with only from a distance, to direct-touch interactive kiosks that provide information of local interest. These different scenarios impose different challenges and research questions regarding the design of interfaces and interaction techniques. The articles in this special issue present snapshots of several ways that researchers are addressing these challenges.

Description: Interactive tabletops and surfaces (ITSs) provide rich opportunities for data visualization and analysis and consequently are used increasingly in such settings. A research agenda of some of the most pressing challenges related to visualization on ITSs emerged from discussions with researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, and a variety of visualization fields at the 2011 Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces (Dexis 2011).

Description: Users increasingly expect more-interactive experiences with public displays for applications including learning, gaming, urban visualization, and planning. However, user interaction with applications on public displays is challenging and often doesn't lend itself to established interaction techniques. Navigation using only freehand gestures captured with low-cost devices might often be an appropriate solution. A formal, quantitative lab experiment and an informal, qualitative field study compared freehand gestural interaction with keyboard-and-mouse interaction. No significant difference in navigation performance existed between the two interaction types. However, gestural interaction provided a more natural experience in both personal and public environments.

Description: As the number of large public displays increases, the need for interaction techniques to control them is emerging. One promising way to provide such interaction is through personal mobile devices. However, although much research has covered this topic, it hasn't yet brought those technologies fully into the public—that is, by allowing for interactions in a variety of public spaces. A proposed tracking technology has led to several prototype applications that employ mobile devices to interact with large public displays. In turn, these prototypes have led to an overarching interaction concept that allows for public deployment regardless of the space's characteristics (for example, layout and technologies).

Description: PhotoCloud is a real-time client-server system for interactive visualization and exploration of large datasets comprising thousands of calibrated 2D photographs of a scene and a complex 3D description of the scene. The system isn't tailored to any specific data acquisition process; it aims at generality and flexibility. PhotoCloud achieves scalability through a multiresolution dynamic hierarchical representation of the data, which is remotely stored and accessed by the client through an efficient cache system. The system includes a compact image browser and a multiresolution model renderer. PhotoCloud employs iconic visualization of the images in the 3D space and projects images onto the 3D scene on the fly. Users can navigate the 2D and 3D spaces with smooth, integrated, seamless transitions between them. A study with differently skilled users confirms PhotoCloud's effectiveness and communication power. The Web extras at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHJB2bhmgB7cmYD0ST9CEDMRv1JlX4xPH are videos demonstrating PhotoCloud, a real-time client-server system for interactive exploration of large datasets comprising 2D photos and 3D models.

Description: Researchers have combined XML3D, which provides declarative, interactive 3D scene descriptions based on HTML5, with Xflow, a language for declarative, high-performance data processing. The result lets Web developers combine a 3D scene graph with data flows for dynamic meshes, animations, image processing, and postprocessing.

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Description: Some people say that undergraduates can't be prepared to participate in original research until, perhaps, their final year of study. This isn't true. Not only can all undergraduates perform original research but, where possible, they should. Toward that end, the Undergraduate Research Alliance provides a channel for faculty and students to discuss their research ideas, successes, failures, needs, and so on.

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Description: Many computer graphics applications must fragment freehand curves into sets of prespecified geometric primitives. For example, sketch recognition typically converts hand-drawn strokes into line and arc segments and then combines these primitives into meaningful symbols for recognizing drawings. However, current fragmentation methods' shortcomings make them impractical. For example, they require manual tuning, require excessive computational resources, or produce suboptimal solutions that rely on local decisions. DPFrag is an efficient, globally optimal fragmentation method that learns segmentation parameters from data and produces fragmentations by combining primitive recognizers in a dynamic-programming framework. The fragmentation is fast and doesn't require laborious and tedious parameter tuning. In experiments, it beat state-of-the-art methods on standard databases with only a handful of labeled examples.

Description: Virtual environments can contribute to the effective learning of various subjects for people of all ages. Consequently, they assist in reducing the cost of maintaining physical structures of teaching, such as laboratories and classrooms. However, the measurement of how learners acquire knowledge in such environments is still incipient in the literature. This article presents a method to evaluate the knowledge acquisition in 3D virtual learning environments (3D VLEs) by using the learner's interactions in the VLE. Three experiments were conducted that demonstrate the viability of using this method and its computational implementation. The results suggest that it is possible to automatically assess learning in predetermined contexts and that some types of user interactions in 3D VLEs are correlated with the user's learning differential.

Description: Optical see-through head-mounted displays enable augmented reality (AR) applications that display virtual objects overlaid on the real world. At the core of this new generation of devices are low-cost tracking technologies that allow us to interpret users' motion in the real world in relation to the virtual content for the purposes of navigation and interaction. The advantages of pervasive tracking come at the cost of limiting interaction possibilities, however. To address these challenges the authors introduce GyroWand, a raycasting technique for AR HMDs using inertial measurement unit (IMU) rotational data from a handheld controller.

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Description: In underwater environments, the scattering and absorption phenomena affect the propagation of light, degrading the quality of captured images. In this work, the authors present a method based on a physical model of light propagation that takes into account the most significant effects to image degradation: absorption, scattering, and backscattering. The proposed method uses statistical priors to restore the visual quality of the images acquired in typical underwater scenarios.

Description: Public concern surrounding the effects video games have on players has inspired a large body of research, and policy makers in China and South Korea have even mandated systems that limit the amount of time players spend in game. The authors present an experiment that evaluates the effectiveness of such policies. They show that forcibly removing players from the game environment causes distress, potentially removing some of the benefits that games provide and producing a desire for more game time. They also show that, with an understanding of player psychology, playtime can be manipulated without significantly changing the user experience or negating the positive effects of video games.

Description: Dennis Hylnsky, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and head of the Film/Animation/Video Department, is a practicing artist and early adopter of electronic media. At RISD he has studied 3D modeling and animation. One of his current projects focuses on the movement of small animals and what animal visualizations can tell us. In this issue's Art on Graphics, department editors Bruce Campbell and Francesca Samsel talk with Hylnsky about his work and how it can help to bridge the gap between art and science practice and facilitate a dialogue between the two communities.

Description: CG&A welcomes Frank Steinicke (University of Hamburg) and Wolfgang Stuerzlinger (Simon Fraser University) as new members to its editorial board and as the new coeditors of the Spatial Interfaces department.

Description: Eric Wayne implements a technique he calls "digital impasto" in order to replicate traditional painting on a computer. The technique emerged as a result of Wayne's natural affinity for traditional painters who originally used the technique. Working in software then allows him to integrate such an approach with methods unique to the digital world.

Description: Premo offers a state-of-the-art animator experience with fully deforming characters, complex environments, and real-time lighting that is indicative of final rendered images. The technology used in Premo unlocks novel workflows that keep an animator highly efficient and engaged in the creative process. The result is a natural interface for 3D animation, in contrast to the highly technical interfaces often required by other professional animation tools. Premo was successfully deployed on the feature animated film How to Train Your Dragon 2 and is now being used by all DreamWorks animators.

Description: Schwarz-Christoffel mapping is an elegant theory that can preserve the structure of a pattern perfectly. One of the most important elements of conformal mapping theory, Schwarz-Christoffel mapping has important applications in many engineering fields, such as electromagnetism, aerodynamics, and thermal field theory. Building on their 2014 CG&A article titled "Beautiful Math, Part 3: Hyperbolic Aesthetic Patterns Based on Conformal Mappings," the authors apply the professional numerical methods of Schwarz-Christoffel mapping to achieve real polygon boundaries.

Description: Domestic energy conservation is critical to reducing energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. Personal visualization has a role to play in the design of appropriate feedback for encouraging more effective home energy use, but the unique nature of residential energy informatics introduces new design issues. This article reviews current approaches and discusses unaddressed challenges related to better conceptual models, context, enhanced communicative scope, and functional aesthetics. Based on a proposed theoretical framework, the author identifies important gaps in the current design space of residential energy visualizations related to richer data models, a broader concept of context, an enhanced communicative scope, and a better ecological fit in the home.

Description: For each and every one of us, big data impinges on our personal and professional lives. However, the development of visualization and visual analytics tools has focused on data important to science, business, and government. This special issue gathers six research articles that explore personal visualization and analytics, showing the range and diversity of topics, ranging from health and fitness information, to energy consumption, to records of their interactions with others through social media. The articles in this issue illustrate that personal visualization and analytics offer substantial opportunities to help individuals gain insight and knowledge about themselves and their communities.

Description: This article explores the potential for creating personal visualization of participation in sports cycling as a design study. Examples show riders' personal narratives and performances relative to other participants in long-distance cycling events. Minimalist cartographic design is applied during the automatic generation of profile maps, which allows personal textual narratives to be attached to visualizations of 3D variations in terrain. Changes in relative position and time-in-hand data during mass participation events are shown as position charts, and animations of rider density over time are used to visualize the progress of larger groups of riders in an event. The designs focus on representing the aspects of participation that evoke an emotional response in an effort to engage users.

Description: In an effort to determine what elements need to be considered when designing personal visualizations, this research study explores how users react to different personal visualization designs. The authors present three distinct personal visualization designs (Timeline, Spark, and Bouquet) for visualizing Facebook user data. In a scenario-based user study, they interview participants to evaluation each design's utility, exploring the visualization of the users' own data, comparing two personal visualizations, and analyzing a series of personal visualizations. The analysis of the recorded conversations suggests that the illustrative design was the most well-balanced with respect to relaying information, motivating data exploration, and providing personal insights to the users. The authors believe this study will help guide future developers regarding the design of personal visualizations.

Description: Most data acquired from the real world is or can be interpreted as geometric in nature. Advanced and affordable sensors, printers, displays, and the Internet make geometric data increasingly important for many disciplines. Giving structure and meaning to this data has been one of the main challenges of computer graphics as well as other fields in the last few decades. The author's PhD thesis started as an effort to turn this massive amount of data into digitally meaningful representations useful for various applications in computer graphics and beyond. In turn, his work targets the problems of reconstructing manifold surfaces and stochastic point patterns from unstructured point samples.

Description: As digital notebooks become common forms of external memory, keeping track of these volumes of content is also becoming increasingly difficult. Information visualization tools can provide note-takers with an overview of their content and allow them to explore diverse sets of notes, find and organize related content, and compare their notes with collaborators. To ground the design of such tools, the authors conducted a detailed mixed-methods study of digital note-taking practice. They identify a variety of editing, organization, and sharing methods used by digital note-takers, many of which result in notes becoming "lost in the pile." These findings form the basis for the authors' design considerations that examine how visualization can support the revisitation, organization, and sharing of digital notes.

Description: This article describes a simple course exercise to deepen the understanding of real-time shadow volume algorithms. The exercise takes less than 10 minutes to perform during lecture time, leads to a profounder understanding of the topic, and serves as a basis for further discussions of improvements for the shadow mapping algorithm. Using this exercise, the authors noticed an increase in students implementing shadow algorithms for later real-time graphics projects.

Description: In many research fields, eye tracking has become an established method to analyze the distribution of visual attention in various scenarios. In the near future, eye tracking is expected to become ubiquitous, recording massive amounts of data in everyday situations. To make use of this data, new approaches for personal visual analytics will be necessary to make the data accessible, allowing nonexpert users to re-experience interesting events and benefit from self-reflection. This article discusses how eye tracking fits in the context of personal visual analytics, the challenges that arise with its application to everyday situations, and the research perspectives of personal eye tracking. As an example, the authors present a technique for representing areas of interest (AOIs) from multiple videos: the AOI cloud. They apply this technique to examine a user's personal encounters with other people.

Description: Data visualization and analytics research has great potential to empower people to improve their lives by leveraging their own personal data. However, most quantified selfers (Q-Selfers) are neither visualization experts nor data scientists. Consequently, visualizations Q-Selfers created with their data are often not ideal for conveying insights. Aiming to design a visualization system to help nonexperts gain and communicate personal data insights, the authors conducted a predesign empirical study. Through the lens of Q-Selfers, they examined what insights people gain specifically from their personal data and how they use visualizations to communicate their insights. Based on their analysis of 30 quantified self-presentations, they characterized eight insight types (detail, self-reflection, trend, comparison, correlation, data summary, distribution, and outlier) and mapped the visual annotations used to communicate them. They further discussed four areas for the design of personal visualization systems, including support for encouraging self-reflection, gaining valid insight, communicating insight, and using visual annotations.

Description: The success of visual analytics is predicated on the ability of users to interactively explore information. Humans think about their data through interactive visual exploration, including testing hypotheses, exploring anomalies, and other cognitive processes of building understanding from data. The claim that these insights are generated as a result of the interaction led the attendees at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) workshop on "Semantic Interaction: Coupling Cognition and Computation through Usable Interactive Analytics" to posit that user interaction must play a more central role in visual analytics systems, serving as the method for coupling cognition and computation. The claims and design principles discussed in this workshop report present research directions to advance visual analytics via a user interaction approach called semantic interaction.

Description: Comic art consists of a sequence of panels of different shapes and sizes that visually communicate the narrative to the reader. The move-on-stills technique allows such still images to be retargeted for digital displays via camera moves. Today, moves-on-stills can be created by software applications given user-provided parameters for each desired camera move. The proposed algorithm uses viewer gaze as input to computationally predict camera move parameters. The authors demonstrate their algorithm on various comic book panels and evaluate its performance by comparing their results with a professional DVD.

Description: Aging-associated changes in visual acuity, cognition, and motor control in addition to attitudinal and affective perceptions of technology impact the design of information systems for older adults. Although design guidelines and cognitive theories on information visualization exist, they are often understudied for use with older adults. In an effort to evaluate interactive health visualizations with older adults, the authors applied and compared a benchmark evaluation, an insight-based evaluation, and a subjective usability questionnaire. They were unable to identify statistically significant differences between visualizations using the benchmark evaluation, but found moderate differences with the perceived usability scale and more granular differences through the insight evaluation.

Description: Low cost remote sensing imagery has the potential to make precision farming feasible in developing countries. In this article, the authors describe image acquisition from eucalyptus, bean, and sugarcane crops acquired by low-cost and low-altitude systems. They use different approaches to handle low-altitude images in both the RGB and NIR (near-infrared) bands to estimate and quantify plantation areas.

Description: The authors have developed a novel approach to evaluating the aesthetic quality of the camera direction in video game scenes rendered in real time while the game is being played. Their goal was to improve the visual aesthetic quality of computer-generated images using a computational aesthetics approach via a regression machine learning model. Considering the challenges and limitations involved, the proposed approach yielded promising prediction performance. The results show that near-real-time aesthetic analysis and visual improvement is possible using a virtual camera director.

Description: The theme articles in this issue highlight the breadth of computer graphics and visualization research, development, and applications that make up our research field. CG&A also welcomes two new members to its editorial board: Jan Bender (Technische Universität Darmstadt) and Victoria Interrante (University of Minnesota).

Description: A long-term goal in prostate cancer research is a sound prognosis prior to surgery, and as a consequence, data-centered research is becoming increasingly important. Currently, it takes several days to define meaningful cohorts by manually selecting patients from health record systems and performing statistical hypothesis tests with cohorts. The authors developed an efficient and effective visual-interactive system for the definition and analysis of patient cohorts. The system provides an overview of large sets of patient records and allows medical researchers to interactively drill down to relevant patient cohorts. In addition, a guidance concept helps them identify interesting relations between defined cohorts and rich sets of attributes available in the patient records. The system increases the efficiency of the researchers' analytical workflow by reducing the temporal effort from days to minutes.

Description: The growing volumes of time-stamped data available from sensors, social media sources, Web logs, and medical histories present remarkable opportunities for researchers and policy analysts. Although big data resources can provide valuable insights to help us understand complex systems and lead to better decisions for business, national security, cybersecurity, and healthcare, there are many challenges to dealing with the volume and variety of data. Data cleaning and data wrangling has received some attention with the development of application tools, but data focusing to sharpen the analytic focus remains a challenge. To address this challenge, this article provides a taxonomy of analytic focusing strategies for temporal event sequences.

Description: Characterizing the existing funding portfolio of a federal agency is difficult due to the number, complexity, and diversity of funded projects and associated metadata. Determining the impact of a funded project can be even more challenging, especially in terms of qualifying the return on investment of the research activity. Deep Insights Anywhere, Anytime (DIA2) is an interactive data-mining and Web-based visualization platform that makes it easy to access and understand funding portfolios. The authors performed an assessment of DIA2's usability and asked users at the US National Science Foundation how DIA2 can provide meaningful representations that contribute to determining the impact of a research portfolio. Their results show that DIA2 has good usability, and the study participants identified several indicators of impact as a result of the visualizations that can be realized through DIA2.

Description: Sensemaking is a process of finding meaning from information that often involves activities such as information foraging and hypothesis generation. It can be valuable to maintain a history of the data and reasoning involved. This history, commonly known as provenance information, can be a resource for "reflection-in-action"' during analysis, supporting collaboration between analysts, and can help trace data quality and uncertainty through the analysis process. Currently, there is limited work on utilizing analytic provenance, which captures the interactive data exploration and human reasoning process, to support sensemaking. This article presents and extends the research challenges discussed in a IEEE VIS 2014 workshop on this topic to provide an agenda for sensemaking analytic provenance.

Description: Data visualization is ubiquitous in today's society. In the last decade, research in the field has increased tremendously, and the research community has pushed the state of the art in many novel directions. In 2014, the IEEE VIS Conference celebrated its 25th year and grew to incorporate new symposia on large-scale data analysis and visualization (LDAV) and biological visualizations (BioVis). It also featured an increasingly popular art program (VISAP) and an impressive array of workshops and tutorials. The VIS 2014 workshop program, through eight extremely well attended half-day and full-day events, offered a unique peak at emerging research topics in the field of data visualization. This special issue samples contributions made to these workshops by showcasing two research pieces that aim at pushing the state of the art to enable data-driven discoveries with visualization.

Description: Creating photo-real digital human faces remains one of the biggest challenges in computer graphics. A core component of the challenge comes from the high complexity of the human face, and the difficult task of building realistic faces is aggravated by human perception. Based on the work of his doctorial thesis, the author and his colleagues developed a fully passive and markerless system that reconstructs facial geometry at the skin pore level and at a full frame rate, achieving the highest spatiotemporal resolution to date. Passive capture setups are simpler than active ones and only require cameras and static illumination. The author's research has already been implemented in production systems and used by the commercial videogame and entertainment industries.