Object-in-Hand Feature Displacement with Physically-Based Deformation

Data deformation has been widely used in visualization to obtain an improved view that better helps the comprehension of the data. It has been a consistent pursuit to conduct interactive deformation by operations that are natural to users. In this paper, we propose a deformation system following the object-in-hand metaphor. We utilize a touchscreen to directly manipulate the shape of the data by using fingers. Users can drag data features and move them along with the fingers. Users can also press their fingers to hold other parts of the data fixed during the deformation, or perform cutting on the data using a finger. The deformation is executed using a physically-based mesh, which is constructed to incorporate data properties to make the deformation authentic as well as informative. By manipulating data features as if handling an object in hand, we can successfully achieve less occluded view of the data, or improved feature layout for better view comparison. We present case studies on various types of scientific datasets, including particle data, volumetric data, and streamlines.