We anticipate that while working with CAVE hardware and software interfaces design we will encounter new ideas that will also enhance the 3D visualization techniques used on desktop workstations. For this we anticipate the purchase of some stero-scopic workstation displays. We expect researchers from a variety of disciplines on campus to participate in both designing and testing our workstation-CAVE interface tool, hence giving the HCI evaluation team the opportunity to study a much wider variety of 3D visualization applications. We plan to make our resulting software widely available to the general research community, DoD agencies and their industrial partners. The fundamental mathematical structure of many data spaces is generally multidimensional, and the goal is to fathom the structures through 3D views of that space.
Many scientific disciplines produce and use large, multidimensional databases.
Collected nearly every year for about 20 years, the GSS contains hundreds of individual questions each administered to hundreds of individuals regarding preferences and demographic statistics. Another example is the US Census, issued as hundreds of statistics on each census tract. Large scale computations such as the multidisciplinary design optimization of an aircraft or weather forecasting produce far too much data to exhaustively visualize. Most scientific visualization software today is designed to visualize numerical data, or data that has as its domain a set whose members are totally ordered, such as integers or real numbers. Genome sequences and individuals in a demographic study are categorical data.