APAS 2900
"SEEING SCIENCE" COMPUTER VISUALIZATIONS OF NATURAL PHENOMENA

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SYLLABUS

1. SCOPE & IMPACT OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION
   • Reading: Mapping the Next Millenium, Hall; Visualization of Natural Phenomena, Wolff & Yaeger.
   • Voyager images of the outer planets.
   • Remote sensing and imaging of Earth's biomass, oceans and atmospheres by NASA satellite missions (Landsat, Geosat, Nimbus)
   • Visualizing weather.
   • Astrophysical images. Hubble Space Telescope. Radio astronomy.
   • Measuring and visualizing "invisible" natural phenomena (e.g., particles and fields in interplanetary space).
   • Images in medicine.
   • Images in chemistry and physics.
   • Animatations and simulations.
   
   
2. PSYCHOLOGY OF VISUALIZATION
   • Textbooks: Seeing the Light" Falk, Brill, Stork & Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution
   • Receptive fields, edge enhancement and lateral inhibition.
   • Color mixing, perception and "constancy".
   • Binocular vision and depth cues.
   • Persistence of vision and animation.
   
   
3. VISUALIZING NUMERICAL INFORMATION
   • MacIntosh Software: Excel and Mathematica
   • Plotting curves to represent data.
   • Surfaces as representations of data.
   • Contour plots.
   • Use of color to represent numbers.
   • Animations
   • Digitization of data and sampling.
   
   
4. HOW COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORKS
   • Reading: How Computer Graphics Work, Prosise.
   • Pixels, antialiasing.
   • Color, additive mixing, dithering.
   • Digitizing, scanning, bitmapped file storage.
   • Image compression and image processing.
   • 3-D rendering.
   
   
5. IMAGE PROCESSING
   • Visualization of Natural Phenomena, Wolff & Yaeger, How Computer Graphics Work, Prosise
   • Adobe Photoshop - hands on processing of images
   • Sharpening and other filters.
   • Color enhancement and false color
   
   

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PROJECTS

• ADDING TO A WORLD WIDE WEB HOME PAGE
• IMAGE ENHANCEMENTS USING PHOTOSHOP
• SURFACE AND ANIMATIONS OF DATA SUCH AS WEATHER