Description

The Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers (VAPOR) is 3D visualization environment software developed at NCAR that is especially useful with very large data sets. Although the current version allows standard manipulation tasks such as rotation, translation, and zoom on the visualization, it does not have the capability to animate between two key-frames that have different camera positions. The aim of my project is to develop a prototype that will support animation control capabilities in VAPOR. Such a prototype will be able to create a smooth animation of the visualization between two or more key-frames with the added ability to control the speed of animation. Providing such animation capabilities requires identification of a suitable family of splines (Hermite Spline in this case) to generate a series of viewpoints between key-frames so that a smooth interpolation can be achieved. In addition, parameterization of the spline curve is essential to control the uniformity of speed between two key-frames. Another objective of the project is also to carry out user testing of the “animation” GUI and enhance it so that it becomes more intuitive and presents minimum learnability issues to the end user.