Immersive and Interactive Visualization of Temporal 3D Data
Gwendal Fouché · theses.fr (ABES) · 2022
3D temporal data are more and more present as acquisition and generation methods improve, notably in the field of biological imagery. However, visualization methods to analyze these datasets can be insufficient.In this thesis, we present a series of contributions leveraging techniques from the fields of Virtual Reality and Visualization to support the exploration and interaction with various types of 3D temporal datasets, and illustrate our proposed methods through examples from biology, notably embryos and intra-cellular imaging.First, we introduce the notion of 4D objects to qualify 3D temporal features in order to highlight semantically logic entities, supporting natural visualization and interaction.Second, we extend the traditional Space-Time Cube representation to 3D temporal data, resulting in a 4D volume named Space-Time Hypercube. A 3D view can be extracted from this 4D volume through a user-driven projection operation, which can be explored with adapted 3D user interaction.Third, we propose a design space to create 3D timelines to support the visualization of 3D temporal data. It extends the existing design space for usual timeline visualizations, yet exploits the 3D space offered by virtual environments. We propose adapted 3D user interaction processes to help manipulating and navigating through this visualization efficiently.Finally, we propose a selection technique for 4D objects punctual in time, based on a Space-then-Time selection process. We discuss techniques to visualize the data, to support adapted methods to select a region in the 3D space, and finally disambiguate in time to select the right 4D object.