Hypervolume visualization: a challenge in simplicity

Hyper-volume visualization is designed to provide simple and fully explanatory images that give comprehensive insights into the global structure of scalar elds of any dimension. The basic idea is to have a dimension independent viewing system that scales nicely with the geometric dimension of the dataset and that can be combined with classical approaches like isocontouring and animation of slices of nD data. We completely abandon (for core simplicity) rendering techniques, such as hidden surface removal or lighting or radiosity, that enhance three dimensional realism and concentrate on the realtime display of images that highlight structural (topological) features of the nD dataset (holes, tunnels, cavities, depressions, extrema, etc). Hyper-volume visualization on the one hand is a generalization of direct parallel projection methods in volume rendering. To achieve e ciency (and real-time performance on a graphics workstation) we combine the advantages of (i) a hierarchical representations of the hyper-volume data for multiresolution display and (ii) generalized object space splatting combined with texture-mapped graphics hardware acceleration. The development of a system that implements display techniques for multidimensional datasets require