Animated Versus Static Views of Steady Flow Patterns
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
7-2016
Publication Title
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception
Abstract
Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that animated representations of vector fields are more effective than common static representations even for steady flow. We compared four flow visualization methods: animated streamlets, animated orthogonal line segments (where short lines were elongated orthogonal to the flow direction but animated in the direction of flow), static equally spaced streamlines, and static arrow grids. The first experiment involved a pattern detection task in which the participant searched for an anomalous flow pattern in a field of similar patterns. The results showed that both the animation methods produced more accurate and faster responses. The second experiment involved mentally tracing an advection path from a central dot in the flow field and marking where the path would cross the boundary of a surrounding circle. For this task the animated streamlets resulted in better performance than the other methods, but the animated orthogonal particles resulted in the worst performance. We conclude with recommendations for the representation of steady flow patterns.
Recommended Citation
Ware, C., Bolan, D., Miller, R., Rogers, D. H., & Ahrens, J. P. (2016, July). Animated versus static views of steady flow patterns. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (pp. 77-84). ACM.
Comments
© 2016 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the United States government. As such, the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.