Cinematic scientific visualization (CSV) is the visual presentation of scientific data in a way that is typically associated with non-scientific filmmaking techniques including cinematography, lighting, and composition. Cinematic scientific visualizations are often created for purposes of science communication to the general public, e.g. through museum exhibits and documentary films. [1] CSV is considered a subfield of scientific visualization, although the creation methods and visual outputs differ due to CSV's heavy emphasis on aesthetics and design.
Traditional scientific visualization and cinematic scientific visualization differ in a number of important ways:
Traditional Scientific Visualization | Cinematic Scientific Visualization | |
---|---|---|
Purpose | Data analysis | Science communication |
Audience | Scientists | General public |
Visual Style | Didactic, diagramatic | Photorealistic, cinematic |
Development Platform | Scientific tools (e.g. ParaView, VisIt) | Visual effects software (e.g. Houdini, Autodesk Maya) |
The first large scale broadly-distributed cinematic scientific visualization appeared in the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage in 1996, though at the time this was simply referred to as a "scientific visualization" without the "cinematic" qualifier. [2] The term "cinematic scientific visualization" was first published by Donna Cox in 2008 referring to work created by the Advanced Visualization Lab [3] and was popularized by Kalina Borkiewicz of the same lab who published a series of papers, conference presentations, and interviews on the topic beginning in 2017. [4] [5] [6] [7] [1] The term is now widely used to describe work done by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, [8] Siemens Healthineers, [9] NVIDIA, [10] and others.
In 2014, the film Interstellar featured a cinematic scientific visualization of a physically-accurate black hole in a science fiction film. [11]
Rendering is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from input data such as 3D models. The word "rendering" originally meant the task performed by an artist when depicting a real or imaginary thing. Today, to "render" commonly means to generate an image or video from a precise description using a computer program.
Scientific visualization is an interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with the visualization of scientific phenomena. It is also considered a subset of computer graphics, a branch of computer science. The purpose of scientific visualization is to graphically illustrate scientific data to enable scientists to understand, illustrate, and glean insight from their data. Research into how people read and misread various types of visualizations is helping to determine what types and features of visualizations are most understandable and effective in conveying information.
In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field.
Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is an area of computer graphics that focuses on enabling a wide variety of expressive styles for digital art, in contrast to traditional computer graphics, which focuses on photorealism. NPR is inspired by other artistic modes such as painting, drawing, technical illustration, and animated cartoons. NPR has appeared in movies and video games in the form of cel-shaded animation as well as in scientific visualization, architectural illustration and experimental animation.
Donna J. Cox is an American artist and scientist, Michael Aiken Endowed Chair; Professor of Art + Design; Director, Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); Director, Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); and Director, edream. She is a recognized pioneer in computer art and scientific visualization, specifically cinematic scientific visualization.
Software visualization or software visualisation refers to the visualization of information of and related to software systems—either the architecture of its source code or metrics of their runtime behavior—and their development process by means of static, interactive or animated 2-D or 3-D visual representations of their structure, execution, behavior, and evolution.
Data and information visualization is the practice of designing and creating easy-to-communicate and easy-to-understand graphic or visual representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and information with the help of static, dynamic or interactive visual items. Typically based on data and information collected from a certain domain of expertise, these visualizations are intended for a broader audience to help them visually explore and discover, quickly understand, interpret and gain important insights into otherwise difficult-to-identify structures, relationships, correlations, local and global patterns, trends, variations, constancy, clusters, outliers and unusual groupings within data. When intended for the general public to convey a concise version of known, specific information in a clear and engaging manner, it is typically called information graphics.
Molecular graphics is the discipline and philosophy of studying molecules and their properties through graphical representation. IUPAC limits the definition to representations on a "graphical display device". Ever since Dalton's atoms and Kekulé's benzene, there has been a rich history of hand-drawn atoms and molecules, and these representations have had an important influence on modern molecular graphics.
Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing. He is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) is an interdisciplinary research lab and graduate studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, bringing together faculty, students and staff primarily from the Art and Computer Science departments of UIC. The primary areas of research are in computer graphics, visualization, virtual and augmented reality, advanced networking, and media art. Graduates of EVL either earn a Masters or Doctoral degree in Computer Science.
Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction drama film directed by Christopher Nolan, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where Earth is suffering from catastrophic blight and famine, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for mankind.
Fluid animation refers to computer graphics techniques for generating realistic animations of fluids such as water and smoke. Fluid animations are typically focused on emulating the qualitative visual behavior of a fluid, with less emphasis placed on rigorously correct physical results, although they often still rely on approximate solutions to the Euler equations or Navier–Stokes equations that govern real fluid physics. Fluid animation can be performed with different levels of complexity, ranging from time-consuming, high-quality animations for films, or visual effects, to simple and fast animations for real-time animations like computer games.
Lawrence Jay Rosenblum is an American mathematician, and Program Director for Graphics and Visualization at the National Science Foundation.
Femto-photography is a technique for recording the propagation of ultrashort pulses of light through a scene at a very high speed (up to 1013 frames per second). A femto-photograph is equivalent to an optical impulse response of a scene and has also been denoted by terms such as a light-in-flight recording or transient image. Femto-photography of macroscopic objects was first demonstrated using a holographic process in the 1970s by Nils Abramsson at the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). A research team at the MIT Media Lab led by Ramesh Raskar, together with contributors from the Graphics and Imaging Lab at the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, more recently achieved a significant increase in image quality using a streak camera synchronized to a pulsed laser and modified to obtain 2D images instead of just a single scanline.
Holly Rushmeier is an American computer scientist and is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. She is known for her contributions to the field of computer graphics.
Michael Kass is an American computer scientist best known for his work in computer graphics and computer vision. He has won an Academy Award and the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award and is an ACM Fellow.
Nelson Max is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1967, advised by Herman Gluck. His research interests include scientific visualization, computer animation, photorealistic computer graphics rendering, multi-view stereo reconstruction, and augmented reality. In his visualization section, he worked on molecular graphics, and volume and flow visualization, particularly on irregular finite element meshes. He has rendered realistic lighting effects in clouds, trees, and water waves, and has produced numerous computer animations, shown at the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conferences, and in OMNIMAX stereo at the Fujitsu Pavilions at Expo ’85 in Tsukuba Japan, and at Expo ’90 in Osaka Japan. He received the prestigious Steven A. Coons Award in 2007, and is a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy.
The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) is a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The AVL specializes in creating cinematic scientific visualizations of large, three-dimensional, time-evolving data. The AVL has contributed to a number of scientific documentaries including the IMAX films "A Beautiful Planet". and "Hubble 3D", a number of fulldome films, and television documentaries.
Edward A. "Ed" Kramer is a computer graphics pioneer who worked in computer-generated imagery (CGI). ACM SIGGRAPH, a Special Interest Group focused on computer graphics within the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), recognizes him as a member of "SIGGRAPH Pioneers." As of 2024, he is chair of the SIGGRAPH Pioneers.