A direct manipulation interface for time navigation in scientific visualizations

Abstract

Scientific visualization tools are applied to gain understanding of time-varying simulations. When these simulations have a high temporal resolution or simulate a long time span, efficient navigation in the temporal dimension of the visualization is mandatory. For this purpose, we propose direct manipulation of visualization objects to control time. By dragging objects along their three-dimensional trajectory, a user can navigate in time by specifying spatial input. We propose two interaction techniques for different kinds of trajectories. In the design phase of these methods, we conducted expert evaluations. To show the benefits of the techniques, we compare them in a user study with the traditional slider-based interface.