Browsing by Author "Ertl, Thomas (Prof.)"

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Open Access
Interactive visualization methods for mobile device applications
(2006) Diepstraten, Joachim; Ertl, Thomas (Prof.)
The number of mobile devices today already outnumbers the installed desktop PCs and this gap will further widen in the future since the market for desktop PCs is stagnating but is still growing for mobile devices. For example, the cellular phone is one of the most widespread devices that can display graphical content and its functionality is constantly increasing. Even with the increased functionality on recent mobile devices bringing interactive graphics and visualization methods to these devices is not as easy as it might appear to be. Strategies and ideas that work for desktop machines cannot necessarily be transferred to mobile devices because they have very different characteristics. The purpose of this thesis is to exactly address this problem. The current limitations of these devices -- limited processing power, small amount of memory, low bandwidth, limited network capacities, small display area -- that hinder the usage of current visualization applications on these devices are identified. In order to overcome them, several different strategies are presented that allow interactive 3D graphic solutions to run on mobile devices. These strategies take advantage of different properties of a mobile device, e.g., network speed. Which strategy should be employed for a graphical application can be decided based on the properties of the device that suit best to the strategy. Moreover, algorithms for presenting data in a resource friendly, user recognizable form but at the same time taking account of the display limitations are introduced by addressing ideas in illustrative and artistic rendering. A special focus in this thesis is on the representation of transparency that plays a significant role in extending the usable space for visualizing information. In this thesis several strategies taken from artistic rendering have been successfully applied to the context of mobile rendering solutions. Additionally, a 3D graphical user interface was designed that is well suited to solve spatial problems in mobile devices and allows developers to build new classes of modern user interfaces. All the new algorithms explained in this thesis do not only extend the capabilities of bringing interactive 3D graphics to mobile device, but can for example also be used for enhancing the richness of visualization or non-photorealistic rendering methods in any sort of interactive environment.