ScaleTraversal: Creating Multi-Scale Biomedical Animation with Limited Hardware Resources

Richen Liu, Hansheng Wang, Hailong Wang, Siru Chen, Chufan Lai, Ayush Kumar, Siming Chen

Abstract: We design ScaleTraversal, an interactive tool for creating multi-scale 3D demonstration animations with limited resources for users who are unavailable to access high performance machines such as clusters or super computers. It is challenging to create 3D demonstration animations for multi-modal and multi-scale data. First, it is challenging to strike a balance between flexibility and user friendliness to design the user interface in customizing demonstration animations. Second, the multi-scale biomedical data is often characterized as large-size so that a commonly-used desktop PC is hard to handle. We design an interactive bi-functional user interface to create multi-scale biomedical demonstration animations intuitively. It fully utilizes the strengths of graphical interface’s user friendliness and textual interface’s flexibility, which enables users to customize demonstration animations from macro-scales to meso- and micro-scales. Furthermore, we design four scale-based memory management strategies to solve the challenging issues presented in multi-scale data. They are streaming data processing strategy, scale level data prefetching strategy, memory utilization strategy, and GPU acceleration strategy for rendering. Finally, we conduct both quantitative evaluation and qualitative evaluation to demonstrate the efficiency, expressiveness and usability of ScaleTraversal.

Primary Subject Area: [Experience] Interactions and Quality of Experience

Secondary Subject Area: [Engagement] Summarization, Analytics, and Storytelling, [Experience] Multimedia Applications

Relevance To Conference: Data-driven 3D animation making is a typical research problem in multimedia study. In this paper, we design a novel interactive tool for creating multi-scale 3D demonstration animations with limited resources for users who are unavailable to access high performance machines. We design an interactive bi-functional user interface to customize multi-scale biomedical demonstration animations intuitively. It fully utilizes the strengths of graphical interface's user friendliness and textual interface's flexibility. The input data of the tool is multi-modal and multi-scale biomedical data. Thus, we believe this paper belongs to the theme "Engaging Users with Multimedia" of ACM MM.

Submission Number: 2963