Research Overview

Touch-sensitive displays make it possible to explore alternative ways of presenting and interacting with scientific visualizations. In particular, they can be advantageous with respect to immersion, feeling in control, somesthetic feedback, collaboration, and speed of input. We explore touch interfaces that allow people to benefit from these advantages, in particular, for scientific visualization and exploration of data.

Non-photorealistic rendering is inspired by a long tradition of illustration. We applied NPR techniques to illustration and visualization problems in medical, technical, and other domains. We also worked on combining NPR methods with other rendering techniques to create hybrid rendering styles for illustration and visualization.

Many traditional artistic and illustrative depiction techniques have now been simulated withing the context of non-photorealistic rendering. However, many of these techniques can still be visually distinguished from their originals by people looking at such images. We work on identifying the differences between the two groups of images and to understand what this means for a viewer.

I am not only myself actively following open science practices but also investigate how we as a community do it overall and what we can do to improve things even further.

With MOLTV we address the fundamental disconnect between 3D and 2D (or 1D) representations of molecular data, as it is used in a vast number of today's bio-medical and chemical applications. Our fundamental premise is that researchers not only need the long-established 2D representations but also 3D views—in particular those that are shown directly in stereoscopic 3D. Moreover, it is not only required to have access to both types of representations, but it is essential to be able to seamlessly transition between both—in the form of transitional visualizations that allow users to mentally connect both views, to benefit from the cognitive continuity of the data representations. Most of today’s common tools allow the researchers to work with either type of visual, yet typically only with one at a time. While some researchers (including ourselves) have started to explore the design space of transitional visualizations, the existing generic approaches do not take the specific constraints of molecular data representations and the needs of the biomedical application domain into account, or are only able to deal with small molecules. We aim to generalize the transitional visualization and make it easy to be used as actual scientific tools. Here our envisioned transitional visualizations will be able to truly shine in supporting cognitive continuity to facilitate interdisciplinary research: biologists are comfortable with 1D and 2D representations of their data, while they need experts in computational chemistry or biology to decode the molecular interactions that they rely on in 3D space. Through seamless 1D↔2D↔3D transitional visualizations biologists, chemists, and computational experts will finally share one continuous visual language—turning today’s fragmented, discipline-specific views into a single, cognitively coherent workspace for truly collaborative, interdisciplinary discovery at the heart of modern drug-design and precision medicine research.

EDT envisions a future where digital twins are seamlessly integrated into engineering processes, enabling unprecedented levels of insight, optimization, and innovation across various domains. By addressing fundamental scientific challenges and fostering a collaborative ecosystem, EDT aims to establish the foundations for the next generation of digital twin technologies that are robust, adaptable, and ethically responsible. The engineering of digital twins requires a multi-disciplinary effort at the crossroads of software engineering, modeling and simulation, numerical analysis, artificial intelligence, computing systems (HPC, cloud/edge), distributed and embedded systems, HCI, and data management. EDT provides a unique opportunity to foster collaborations between these different scientific communities, creating a multidisciplinary community with international leadership.

The world is flat and rectangular when it comes to the types of physical screens that we use for representing data and making decisions. Display technology, however, is already evolving quickly: curved, bendable, and highly flexible displays, spherical displays, cubed displays, and even drone-based displays have emerged and are commercially available. These novel types of displays offer new ways to represent and explore data embedded in everyday environments, to communicate it, and share it. For a possible future in which non-planar displays will be ubiquitous, however, there are open questions about what visualizations should look like on these displays, how we would interact with them, and how people would engage with them. Non-planar displays, therefore, not only pose perceptual challenges for data visualization, but it is also yet largely unexplored which visualization types work on them and how to create effective and appealing interactive data visualization experiences. As such, the potential and the challenges of these displays for visual data representation remain unexplored. This project aims to escape from the “display flatland” that characterizes today’s research in visualization. It will establish foundations for how to engage with a future in which physical displays take on several different form factors and become truly embedded in our environments.

We investigate hybrid 3D data visualization and analysis environments, which combine the benefits of traditional workstations and augmented reality. While the former have been primarily used in the past for exploring 3D data, AR headsets promise an enhanced way to look at 3D data because they not only support stereoscopic vision, but also allow users to interact with traditional tools. We will specifically study hybrid data analysis of 3D spatial data, for which researchers not only rely on 3D representations but also on scripted analysis, suitable input to specify and refine spatial analysis targets, and interaction designs to select and switch between suitable analysis tools.

Touch interaction is increasingly becoming an important means of human-computer interaction. However, often we have to deal with 3D data, visualizations, or scenes for which regular 2D input as derived from touch surfaces is not sufficient. Here we have to develop means of mapping the 2D input to interactions in 3D space, such that the touch exploration of the 3D environments remains intuitive.

With the growing resolution on today's interactive displays it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain responsiveness of the system. We work on applying techniques from computer graphics to address the complexity issues on such interfaces. In addition, large displays require completely new interaction techniques, including the need to accommodate multiple people, multiple interaction points per person or in general, dealing with orientations and awareness.

Many NPR techniques are encapsulated algorithms that allow little influence on the final product other than global parameter changes. In addition, interfaces for NPR are often cluttered with an enormous number of parameters whose influence is difficult to understand. We work on giving people understandable and direct local control over the rendering process.

Hand-drawn pen-and-ink drawings have fascinated me for a long time. Using non-photorealistic rendering we have worked on generating such drawings consisting of silhouette lines and other strokes with the computer.

When doing research on line rendering and pen-and-ink NPR, in particular if print is the medium that one aims for, one needs to produce high quality images. Therefore, we attempt to produce vector images of my NPR techniques wherever possible.