Data Visualization Trends by R&D Magazine

This article appeared in R&D Magazine in December 1995.

Use of scientific visualization tools has become the de facto method for understanding increasingly complex data collected by researchers. These tools often provide the only way to comprehend multidimensional, multivariate research data by quickly revealing trends and anomalies.

As a result, data acquisition and analysis applications have become the largest use of visualization tools, easily exceeding that of other applications, such as CAD, mechanical modeling, image analysis, and mathematical functions, according to a recent survey by R&D Magazine.

Almost half the survey respondents use visualization tools for data acquisition and analysis functions. In analytical instrumentation, automotive, computer, test and measurement, and medical industries alone, up to 80% of the researchers indicated they used visualization tools for their data analysis work.

About a third of survey respondents use visualization tools for CAD functions, while 25% use them for mechanical modeling and mathematical studies.

Other applications for visualization tools include finite element analysis (22%), microscopic imaging (19%), spectroscopy (18%), process modeling (16%), applied chemistry (16%), electronics (14%), environmental analysis (14%), physics (12%), fluid flow (12%), biotechnology (9%), chromatography (8%), and computational chemistry (8%).

This variety of applications reveals that "visualization means different things to different researchers,'' says Morris Samit, president of DSP Development (Cambridge, Mass.), makers of DADiSP software.

A cardiologist's idea of scientific visualization, for example, may be related to the tools used to help understand various types of electrocardiograms or other patient images. An automotive engineer's interpretation of scientific visualization, on the other hand, might concern tools displaying associations among data in relational databases or the results from various mechanical analyses.

This diversity has resulted in development of a large number and variety of scientific visualization software packages. Not counting researcher's in-house products, more than 70 software systems alone were identified by survey respondents, ranging from math-based systems, such as MathSoft's MathCAD, The MathWorks' MATLAB, and Wolfram Research's Mathematica, to statistical systems, such as Manugistic's Statgraphics Plus. Even the graphics included in some spreadsheet systems, such as Microsoft's Excel or Lotus's 1-2-3, are used by researchers as scientific visualization systems.

"Researchers often don't understand or want to understand the subtle nuances of different software systems,'' says Samit. "They are satisfied when one product performs one type of analysis and when another product can perform a different analysis function.'' Data visualization, however, has become an integral part of each of these systems.

While most people think of software first when referring to visualization systems, hardware also plays an integral role in the images on the monitor. Survey respondents indicated that color/grayscale, image scanning, and real-time imaging were at the top of their list of basic hardware capabilities for their visualization systems.

The survey also revealed that most researchers prefer visualization tools that require no programming functions. More than half the respondents don't spend any time programming, while nearly 90% spend less than five hours a week programming software for visualization.

"Researchers don't have time for programming-- they just want answers to their problems,'' says Samit.

Not surprisingly, survey respondents picked ease of use as the most important "technical" feature of scientific visualization systems. Researchers appear to want solid, basic systems that concentrate on accepting characteristics, such as 3-D capabilities and dimensional scaling.

"It's worth noting how important some of the intangible features of scientific visualization are, such as speed, graphics quality, and price,'' says Lisa Kempler, a visualization software product manager at The MathWorks, Natick, Mass. "These responses vary only slightly across all industries.''

The survey suggests that researchers are less interested--at least for now--in trendy visualization characteristics, such as virtual reality, white boards, multimedia, and even interactive characteristics.

Additionally, while some commercial software can work with data in four or more dimensions, more than 90% of survey respondents said working in only three dimensions was sufficient.

The survey confirmed the dominance of Intel hardware and Microsoft software in visualization systems. Nearly 70% of the researchers run their visualization work on Intel 386- or 486- microprocessor-based PCs. Their systems have an average of 32 MB RAM and more than 800 MB on the hard drive to handle image-intensive scientific visualization processing and storage requirements. More than 40% of respondents already have access to or use Intel Pentium-based systems, while nearly 20% use PowerPC-based processing systems.

More than 70% of respondents run visualization software on Windows 3.x operating systems. Nearly 60%, however, still use DOS-based software.

13% of respondents run their visualization systems on Microsoft's Windows 95 operating systems. This is a surprisingly large proportion, since the software was released at about the same time that the survey was being conducted. (This may reflect Microsoft's wide distribution of Windows 95 beta copies.) If a similar survey is run six months from now, there may be a dramatic rise in the number of Windows 95-based packages--and a similar increase in the number of Pentium-based systems.

The Internet's impact on how visualization software--and all software for that matter--is used, distributed, and created could also greatly alter the results of this survey, even within the next six months.

The survey found that scientific visualization tools are used uniformly across all types of industries, as well as academic and government labs.

--- Tim Studt

For a copy of R&D Magazine's Scientific Visualization Survey ($195), call 847-390-2734 (United States).

Copyright 1995 Cahners Publishing Co.