| Exploring data through various visualization techniques has become common place in science, engineering, banking, and many other domains where massive data need to be explored and analyzed by professionals to make discoveries or to take decisions. The field of scientific visualization has developed many tools that are widely used today to represent and explore complex and large multi-dimensional data sets. In many fields using visualization techniques only to explore data sets has been shown to suffer from many limitations because the representation of multidimensional data on a 2D screen is difficult and not always intuitive. In the scientific visualization community, this problem is called the dimensionality curse. Other sensing modalities, such as sound or haptics can be used either as an alternative or as a complement to visualization to transform complex multi-dimensional data set into one that is easy to perceive. This thesis describes such an interface. We show how a combination of conventional visual rendering with sound rendering can improve the localization of vortex centers in a virtual wind tunnel application. We describe the various elements of this multi-modal interface. In order to evaluate how effective this interface is, we performed a usability study that compared interfaces with sound alone, visualization alone, and visualization and sound combined. The experimental results show that the combination of visualization and sound significantly improve the usability of the interface in a vortex localization task. |
