Affective, Hand-Sculpted Glyph Forms for Engaging and Expressive Scientific Visualization

The live footage of the talk, including the Q&A, can be viewed on the session page, VISAP: Papers 2.

Abstract

As scientific data continues to grow in size, complexity, and density, the representation scope of three-dimensional spaces, data sampling methods, and transfer functions have improved in parallel, allowing visualization practitioners to produce richer multidimensional encodings. Glyphs, in particular, have become an essential encoding tool due to their versatile applications in co-located multivariate volumetric datasets. While prior work has been conducted investigating the perceptual attributes of computationally-generated three-dimensional glyph-forms for scientific visualization, their affective and expressive qualities have yet to be examined. Further, our prior work has demonstrated the benefits of artist hand-created glyph forms in contrast to commonly-used synthetic forms in increasing visual diversity, discrimination, and expressive association in complex environmental datasets. In order to begin to address this gap, we establish preliminary groundwork for an affective design space for hand-created glyph forms, produce a novel set of glyph-forms based on this design space, describe a non-verbal method for discovering affective classifications of glyph-forms adopted from current affect theory, and report the results of two studies that explore how these three-dimensional forms produce consistent affective responses across assorted study cohorts.