Juniper: A 3D plotting framework for effective multi-dimensional scatterplots

Abstract

Computationally and data intensive workloads including design space explorations or large studies often lead to multi-dimensional results, which are often not trivial to digest with conventional plotting software. 3D scatterplots can be a powerful technique to visualise and explore such datasets, especially with the help of colour mapping and other approaches to represent more than the 3 Cartesian dimensions. However, modern software commonly lacks this multi-dimensional functionality or is ineffective. One such limitation is the frequent use of the orthographic projection that produces same-sized points, and this is equivalent to removing one entire dimension.

A novel open-source JavaFX-based plotting framework is presented that focuses on easy exploration of multi-dimensional datasets, and provides unique features and feature combinations to improve knowledge transfer from single stand-alone or interactive plots.