CosmoScout VR: A Modular 3D Solar System Based on SPICE

We present CosmoScout VR - a modular 3D Solar System for interactive exploration and presentation of large space mission datasets. This paper describes the overall architecture as well as several core components of the frame-work. To foster the application in various scientific domains, CosmoScout VR employs a plugin-based architecture. This not only reduces development times but also allows scientists to create their own data visualization plugins without having to modify the core source code of CosmoScout VR. One of the most important plugins - level-of-detail terrain rendering - is described in greater detail in this paper. Another key feature of CosmoScout VR is the scene graph which is tightly coupled with NASA's SPICE library to allow for high-precision positioning of celestial objects, such as planets, moons, and spacecrafts. SPICE is also used for the seamless navigation throughout the Solar System in which the user automatically follows the closest body. During navigation, the virtual scene is scaled in such a way, that the closest celestial body is always within arm's reach. This allows for simultaneous exploration of multiple datasets in their spatial context at diverse scales. However, the navigation uses all six degrees of freedom which can induce motion sickness. In this paper, we present some counter measures as well as evaluate their effectiveness in a user study. CosmoScout VR is open source, cross-platform, and while it can run on conventional desktop PCs, it also supports stereoscopic multi-screen systems, such as display walls, DOMEs or CAVEs

ESID: A Visual Analytics Tool to Epidemiological Emergencies

Visual analysis tools can help illustrate the spread of infectious diseases and enable informed decisions on epidemiology and public health issues. To create visualisation tools that are intuitive, easy to use, and effective in communicating information, continued research and development focusing on user-centric and methodological design models is extremely important. As a contribution to this topic, this paper presents the design and development of the visual analytics application ESID (Epidemiological Scenarios for Infectious Diseases). The goal of ESID is to provide a platform for rapid assessment of the most effective interventions for infectious disease control. ESID provides spatial-temporal analysis, forecasting, comparison of simulations, interactive filters, and accessibility options. In its current form, it shows the simulations of a hybrid graph-equation-based model as introduced in for infection control. The model can be stratified for different age groups and takes into account the properties of the infectious disease as well as human mobility and contact behaviour.Comment: 6 pages, 5 images and 1 table, Eurovis workshop on visual analytics (EuroVA) 202

ESID: Exploring the Design and Development of a Visual Analytics Tool for Epidemiological Emergencies

Visual analytics tools can help illustrate the spread of infectious diseases and enable informed decisions on epidemiological and public health issues. To create visualisation tools that are intuitive, easy to use, and effective in communicating information, continued research and development focusing on user-centric and methodological design models is extremely important. As a contribution to this topic, this paper presents the design and development process of the visual analytics application ESID (Epidemiological Scenarios for Infectious Diseases). ESID is a visual analytics tool aimed at projecting the future developments of infectious disease spread using reported and simulated data based on sound mathematical-epidemiological models. The development process involved a collaborative and participatory design approach with project partners from diverse scientific fields. The findings from these studies, along with the guidelines derived from them, played a pivotal role in shaping the visualisation tool

VVAFER - Versatile Visual Analytics Framework for Exploration and Research

The development of interactive visualization applications that are applicable to many real-world problems is a challenging affair. For every new project, developers need to follow the same repetitive steps of fetching the raw data, transforming the data into processable form, defining visual structures and then displaying them appropriately. To accelerate this, we propose the Versatile Visual Analytics Framework for Exploration and Research (VVAFER). VVAFER is planned to be an extensible visual analytics framework, upon which different applications can be developed with minimum overload at the development side. Through modular architecture, unified data formats, reusable templates and software components, developers will be able to quickly deploy and create their visualization applications by configuring existing templates with their own specific functionalities. In this paper, we describe our motivation for this future framework and its architectural design