Incorporating highlighting animations into static visualizations

Rendering a lot of data results in cluttered visualizations. It is difficult for a user to find regions of interest from contextual data especially when occlusion is considered. We incorporate animations into visualization by adding positional motion and opacity change as a highlighting mechanism. By leveraging our knowledge on motion perception, we can help a user to visually filter out her selected data by rendering it with animation. Our framework of adding animation is the animation transfer function, where it provides a mapping from data and animation frame index to a changing visual property. The animation transfer function describes animations for user selected regions of interest. In addition to our framework, we explain the implementation of animations as a modification of the rendering pipeline. The animation rendering pipeline allows us to easily incorporate animations into existing software and hardware based volume renderers. Figure 1. Animation of the opacity of a foot data set.