Visualising higher-dimensional space-time and space-scale objects as projections to \(\mathbb{R}^3\)
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Graphics, Spatial and Geographic Information Systems
- Keywords
- projections, space-time, space-scale, 4D visualisation, nd gis
- Copyright
- © 2017 Arroyo Ohori et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Visualising higher-dimensional space-time and space-scale objects as projections to \(\mathbb{R}^3\) PeerJ Preprints 5:e2844v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2844v1
Abstract
Objects of more than three dimensions can be used to model geographic phenomena that occur in space, time and scale. For instance, a single 4D object can be used to represent the changes in a 3D object's shape across time or all its optimal representations at various levels of detail. In this paper, we look at how such higher-dimensional space-time and space-scale objects can be visualised as projections from \(\mathbb{R}^4\) to \(\mathbb{R}^3\). We present three projections that we believe are particularly intuitive for this purpose: (i) a simple `long axis' projection that puts 3D objects side by side; (ii) the well-known orthographic and perspective projections; and (iii) a projection to a 3-sphere (\(S^3\)) followed by a stereographic projection to \(\mathbb{R}^3\), which results in an inwards-outwards fourth axis. Our focus is in using these projections from \(\mathbb{R}^4\) to \(\mathbb{R}^3\), but they are formulated from \(\mathbb{R}^n\) to \(\mathbb{R}^{n-1}\) so as to be easily extensible and to incorporate other non-spatial characteristics. We present a prototype interactive visualiser that applies these projections from 4D to 3D in real-time using the programmable pipeline and compute shaders of the Metal graphics API.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science for review.