Volume visualization - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 278

In some systems you see the object stereoscopically through two images in
a pair of goggles - better still, etched on contact lenses, 15 Your wishes are
executed through the movements of your head, hands and even entire body.
For the majority of researchers, however, let alone students studying, interactive
visualization will not arrive for several years yet.
The basic questions of what it is we wish to see and how that should be
drawn remain as important as ever. Interactive computer graphics will allow you
to pick up the earth in your hand and view it just as if it were a real globe 16 - but
we can already do that in the classroom with the plastic model. What is exciting
about visualization is the facility it offers for us to transform what we wish to
observe to a form most amenable to our understanding and then change that, if
it does not suit us, at a whim.
Interactive visualization will reach the microcomputer screen by first offer-
ing the user the ability to link several displays of the same data to gain greater
insight - say a rotating tetrahedron of the Scottish voting composition in one
window coupled with an animated cartogram in another, showing how the distri-
bution of divisions changed geographically over time. An area of Glasgow in the
1970s could be selected and the points representing those divisions would light
up in the tetrahedron simultaneously. As you moved a pointer over the changing
cartogram of Scottish divisions, other points would become lit and you could
trace patterns between geographical, historical and political spaces.
Artificial reality allows us to go one step further: to be actually inside the
tetrahedron; to look in a spacetime cartogram down at the 1986 regional election
results and up at the 1990 contest; to see the dark clouds of unemployment
rising above Glasgow to meet the fine detail of the 1991 census in the distant
sky. Even further above in the far distance are the translucent mosaics formed
from what we know given the 2001 and 2011 censuses. Below us would lie the
remains of decades of industrial structure and behind us the same for England
and Wales. Here 'up' is the future and 'down' is the past. 17 All this will require
considerable imaginative leaps, more research and a great deal of development,
but if we cannot specify our aims at this stage, how can we plan for the future?
15 Rather than wear goggles containing visual displays: 'An alternative design would be to fabri-
cate a display on a contact lens and a sensor would detect eye movements as well as head and body
movements. This display must then generate the image that the eye would see. Since it would only
need to illustrate the small area that the fovea would see, the resolution of the image could be very
modest' (Krueger, 1983, p. 100).
16 This is now possible with 'Google Earth', which, as predicted, does not allow the surface of
the earth to be transformed (yet), for instance, to be a world population cartogram.
17 Different people have different perceptions of what is 'up' and what is 'down' in these virtual
realties. For some the past may be above and they are descending into the future. Place people in the
shadow (or net) of four-dimensional space and, just as in the tesseract, it is possible for some to be
walking on what looks to others to be the ceiling. There is a tesseract spinning at the bottom of my
website: http://www.dannydorling.org/as a reminder that we have yet to visualize using such things in
social science. Click on it for more details. The artist Escher used ideas such as this in his woodcuts.
For the ideas behind Escher's images you can start at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher.