CS 8199: Final Project Info

What Your Project Proposal Should Include:

A brief statement of the topic, including an assessment of its practical relevance and its potential contribution to the state of the art in visualization research.
A plan of work, including at least 2-3 milestones and estimates of the time that will be required to meet each one. Clearly specify what you intend to have done by the halfway point.

I actively encourage those of you who are engaged in an ongoing research project to define a topic that will complement your research efforts.

Possible Kinds of Final Projects

An implementation of a particularly interesting or useful algorithm, such as line integral convolution for vector field visualization, or texture synthesis from sample images.

An applet, that can be run on the web, that demonstrates an important visualization concept. For example how good and bad choices of colormaps can reveal or obscure information in a dataset, or how good and bad choices of texture can reveal or obscure a surface's shape. There are a bunch of examples of these online: David Anson's interactive mach bands, The SF Exploratorium's "Common Cents", Ron Rensink et al.'s "The Need for Attention to See Change"

An experimental evaluation of the relative effectiveness of alternative visualization approaches for a particular application.

A literature review on a topic relevant to visualization research. This could involve further reading in one of the topic areas touched upon in class, or reading on a complementary topic that wasn't covered.

Sample Topics

Representing Uncertainty- Demonstrate some techniques that seem to be particularly well-suited for representing varying levels of confidence. Why are these techniques more successful than others that have been, or could have been, tried?

Non-photorealistic rendering- Implement a simple technique for generating pen-and-ink style drawings using line primitives. Does line direction matter? When might a sketch be more useful than a photograph? How might you attempt to evaluate these kinds of things experimentally?

Painterly Effects- Can you design some impressionistic textures that successfully portray multivalued data? What is the key to their success?

Perceptual Grouping- How might you facilitate the perceptual segregation of two overlapping surfaces, each defined by a collection of discrete texture elements, in a static monocular view?

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