The Essentials of Scientific Visualization: Basic Tools and an Example

The advent of affordable computer graphics hardware and software has initiated great interest in using this technology for interpreting and displaying multidimensional data. This article discusses the use of computer graphics to display data as objects in three-dimensional space (3-D visualization). Its intent is to help social scientists determme if 3-D visualization may be a useful tool in their work and to provide interested researchers with sufficient information to begin the planning process for a visualization laboratory. This paper describes the basic components of a 3-D visualization system and presents an example: a 3-D visualization of data obtained from a political-science survey. A subsequent essay will present basic visualization techniques and examine commonly encountered production problems. Keywords : scientific visualization, datagraphics, statistical analysis, social science, computer graphics.