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Biochemistry
For many science applications, the user must be able to burrow deep into the data. High-level windows may provide diagrams, plots, and lists of major components. Double-click an item in a list to get the next level deeper, and double-click on it's attributes to go even further. Traditional GUI rules say nothing should ever be more than three clicks down from the top level. However, in science applications the data hierarchy is often deep and well-understood by the user. The GUI must reflect the user's expectations, so it must have the same hierarchy of levels as does the data. The image here is a selection of the many windows in a biological pathway graph visualization application. There are windows for chemical compounds, interactions, pathways, and listing windows and database search dialogs for all of these. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation. Development was in Java/Swing and Java OpenGL. |
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Volume editor
Volume rendering focuses on making imagery from 3D grids (volumes) of data. This volume editor generated the grid through a hierarchical scene graph of filtering functions. Each function manipulated input data to generate output data, that could be filtered by another function and so on to create a volumetric scene. Volume functions could apply filtering, thresholding, color assignment, opacity control, or even add turbulence or other shading functions. The image here is a selection of windows for a volume editor I developed in 1998-1999 for the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. The GUI uses X/Motif and SGI's Open Inventor, both of which are rarely used any more. The interface is very gray, klunky, and a bit crowded by today's GUI standards. Today's screens are almost always full color and are higher resolution than in 1999, so today we can use more colors and create bigger windows with more spacing between components. Today's GUI toolkits are also far more flexible. This project was funded by the American Museum of Natural History. Development was in C/C++, X/Motif, and Open Inventor. |
