Metamorphers: Storytelling Templates For Illustrative Animated Transitions in Molecular Visualization

Information

• Publication Type: Conference Paper
• Workgroup(s)/Project(s):
  • Visualization Group
• Date: May 2017
• Location: Mikulov, Czech Republic
• Booktitle: Proceedings of the Spring Conference on Computer Graphics 2017
• Conference date: 15. May 2017 – 17. May 2017
• Pages: 27 – 36
• Keywords: animated transitions, storytelling, molecular visualization

Abstract

In molecular biology, illustrative animations are used to convey complex biological phenomena to broad audiences. However, such animations have to be manually authored in 3D modeling software, a time consuming task that has to be repeated from scratch for every new data set, and requires a high level of expertise in illustration, animation, and biology. We therefore propose metamorphers: a set of operations for defining animation states as well as the transitions to them in the form of re-usable story telling templates. The re-usability is two-fold. Firstly, due to their modular nature, metamorphers can be re-used in different combinations to create a wide range of animations. Secondly, due to their abstract nature, metamorphers can be re-used to re-create an intended animation for a wide range of compatible data sets. Metamorphers thereby mask the low level complexity of explicit animation specifications by exploiting the inherent properties of the molecular data, such as the position, size, and hierarchy level of a semantic data subset.

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BibTeX

@inproceedings{sorger_2017_metamorphers,
  title =      "Metamorphers: Storytelling Templates For Illustrative
               Animated Transitions in Molecular Visualization",
  author =     "Johannes Sorger and Peter Mindek and Peter Rautek and Eduard
               Gr\"{o}ller and Graham Johnson and Ivan Viola",
  year =       "2017",
  abstract =   "In molecular biology, illustrative animations are used to
               convey complex biological phenomena to broad audiences.
               However, such animations have to be manually authored in 3D
               modeling software, a time consuming task that has to be
               repeated from scratch for every new data set, and requires a
               high level of expertise in illustration, animation, and
               biology. We therefore propose metamorphers: a set of
               operations for defining animation states as well as the
               transitions to them in the form of re-usable story telling
               templates. The re-usability is two-fold. Firstly, due to
               their modular nature, metamorphers can be re-used in
               different combinations to create a wide range of animations.
               Secondly, due to their abstract nature, metamorphers can be
               re-used to re-create an intended animation for a wide range
               of compatible data sets. Metamorphers thereby mask the low
               level complexity of explicit animation specifications by
               exploiting the inherent properties of the molecular data,
               such as the position, size, and hierarchy level of a
               semantic data subset.",
  month =      may,
  location =   "Mikulov, Czech Republic",
  booktitle =  "Proceedings of the Spring Conference on Computer Graphics
               2017",
  pages =      "27--36",
  keywords =   "animated transitions, storytelling, molecular visualization",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2017/sorger_2017_metamorphers/",
}