Flow Web: a graph based user interface for 3D flow field exploration

While there have been intensive efforts in developing better 3D flow visualization techniques, little attention has been paid to the design of better user interfaces and more effective data exploration work flow. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based user interface called Flow Web to enable more systematic explorations of 3D flow data. The Flow Web is a node-link graph that is constructed to highlight the essential flow structures where a node represents a region in the field and a link connects two nodes if there exist particles traveling between the regions. The direction of an edge implies the flow path, and the weight of an edge indicates the number of particles traveling through the connected nodes. Hierarchical flow webs are created by splitting or merging nodes and edges to allow for easy understanding of the underlying flow structures. To draw the Flow Web, we adopt force based graph drawing algorithms to minimize edge crossings, and use a hierarchical layout to facili...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: VDA
• Authors: Lijie Xu, Han-Wei Shen
• Keywords: Flow Structures, Flow Web, User Interface, VDA 2010, Visualization