Multi Dimensional functions are very common in engineering problems. The emerging trend to analyze such functions and understand their behavior is to visualize them rather than using complex programs yielding textual output, massive number of printouts and graphs. Visualizations happens to be a more user-friendly approach for such problems allowing users to play with the resulting visualizations to gather useful data.
Several researchers have grappled with this problem and have come out with some interesting solutions. Our approach is to use the focus+context approach. The main objective in this approach is to enable the user to grasp the n-dimensional space of the function which cannot be easily imagined ordinarily. A focal point is selected by the user which happens to be their point of interest. Rays emanate in all directions in the n-dimensional space from the focal point. The ultimate challenge is to represent the functional values on the focal rays onto the screen such that
- more details are seen near the focal point and lesser as the points move further from the focus
- non-lossy representation so that the visualization is accurate
