Multi-level abstraction for visualizing and authoring dynamic complex biological scenes

Biological behaviors in the atomistic detail pose one of the most complex scenes for the visualization field. In my talk, I will introduce a new abstraction space that has a continuum of visual representations for the explanatory analysis of given dynamic complex biological scenes as well as for the authoring of them. The given scenes are usually coming from molecular dynamics simulations while the authoring outcomes are usually animations. An implementation of this new abstraction strategy is applied to the visualization of DNA nanostructure simulation trajectories. It is achieved by re-purposing the commonly used progress bar and designing novel visuals, as well as transforming the data from the domain format to a format that better fits the newly designed visuals. After quickly envisioning the future plans to apply this systematically designed space to the authoring process, the talk will be concluded by discussions about the potential impact of such works on the structural biology domain and the popular science education field.