3D Selection Vault

TeddySelection

For particle clouds on a 2D screen, the user draws a lasso and it is inflated into a 3D selection volume, Teddy-style, whose depth is fitted to where the dense clusters lie inside the lasso.

How it works

The lasso is closed, resampled and triangulated around its spine. Particles are binned in depth, first over the whole lasso frustum and then per triangle, to find the nearest and farthest dense bins, and the mesh is inflated to those depths. Works with mouse or touch. Feedback from three astronomers was positive; it can include empty space between clusters and works poorly in sparse regions, which led to CloudLasso.

Papers

• Lingyun Yu, Konstantinos Efstathiou, Petra Isenberg, Tobias Isenberg (2012). Efficient Structure-Aware Selection Techniques for 3D Point Cloud Visualizations with 2DOF Input. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18(12), 2245-2254 doi:10.1109/TVCG.2012.217