We are developing the tools necessary for Interrogative Visualization of large datasets such as the Visible Human data. Interrogative Visualization consists of three primary components:
It is the premise of this paper that interaction with and interrogation of large datasets allows the visualization user to more effectively browse through the large amounts of data, focus on and query interesting features, and more easily comprehend and make use of the data. We approach all three of the key components through accelerated methods for contour extraction, mesh reduction for improved interactive display, and smooth surface reconstruction for querying. These tools are being developed in an integrated environment called SHASTRA. The SHASTRA collaborative substrate aids in our development of a tele-collaboritive interrogative visualization environment implemented on an ATM workstation cluster with a high-speed link to an Intel Paragon. The computational visualization environment is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Network environment for interrogative
visualization