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At least 469 records · Page 26

Multiple Concurrent Visual-Motor Mappings: Implications for Models of Adaptation

Previous research on adaptation to visual-motor rearrangement suggests that the central nervous system represents accurately only 1 visual-motor mapping at a time. This idea was examined in 3 experiments where subjects tracked a moving target under repeated alternations between 2 initially interfering mappings (the 'normal' mapping characteristic of computer input devices and a 108' rotation of the normal mapping). Alternation between the 2 mappings led to significant reduction in error under the rotated mapping and significant reduction in the adaptation aftereffect ordinarily caused by switching between mappings. Color as a discriminative cue, interference versus decay in adaptation aftereffect, and intermanual transfer were also examined. The results reveal a capacity for multiple concurrent visual-motor mappings, possibly controlled by a parametric process near the motor output stage of processing.

Cunningham, H. A.↗

Visualizing Parallel Computer System Performance

Parallel computer systems are among the most complex of man's creations, making satisfactory performance characterization difficult. Despite this complexity, there are strong, indeed, almost irresistible, incentives to quantify parallel system performance using a single metric. The fallacy lies in succumbing to such temptations. A complete performance characterization requires not only an analysis of the system's constituent levels, it also requires both static and dynamic characterizations. Static or average behavior analysis may mask transients that dramatically alter system performance. Although the human visual system is remarkedly adept at interpreting and identifying anomalies in false color data, the importance of dynamic, visual scientific data presentation has only recently been recognized Large, complex parallel system pose equally vexing performance interpretation problems. Data from hardware and software performance monitors must be presented in ways that emphasize important events while eluding irrelevant details. Design approaches and tools for performance visualization are the subject of this paper.

Malony, Allen D.↗

Forebody Flow Visualization on the F-18 HARV with Actuated Forebody Strakes

Off-surface smoke flow visualization and extensive pressure measurements were obtained on the forebody of the NASA F-18 High Alpha Research Vehicle equipped with actuated forebody strakes. Test points at alpha = 50 deg. were examined in which only one strake was deflected or in which both strakes were deflected differentially. The forebody pressures were integrated to obtain forebody yawing moments. Results showed that small single strake deflections can cause an undesirable yawing moment reversal. At alpha = 50 deg., this reversal was corrected by deploying both strakes at 20 deg. initially, then differentially from 20 deg. to create a yawing moment. The off-surface flow visualization showed that in the case of the small single strake deflection, the resulting forebody/strake vortex remained close to the surface and caused accelerated flow and increased suction pressures on the deflected side. When both strakes were deflected differentially, two forebody/strake vortices were present. The forebody/strake vortex from the larger deflection would lift from the surface while the other would remain close to the surface. The nearer forebody/strake vortex would cause greater flow acceleration, higher suction pressures and a yawing moment on that side of the forebody. Flow visualization provided a clear description of the strake vortices fluid mechanics.

David F Fisher↗

A Graph Based Interface for Representing Volume Visualization Results

This paper discusses a graph based user interface for representing the results of the volume visualization process. As images are rendered, they are connected to other images in a graph based on their rendering parameters. The user can take advantage of the information in this graph to understand how certain rendering parameter changes affect a dataset, making the visualization process more efficient. Because the graph contains more information than is contained in an unstructured history of images, the image graph is also helpful for collaborative visualization and animation.

Patten, James M.↗

Parallel Visualization Co-Processing of Overnight CFD Propulsion Applications

An interactive visualization system pV3 is being developed for the investigation of advanced computational methodologies employing visualization and parallel processing for the extraction of information contained in large-scale transient engineering simulations. Visual techniques for extracting information from the data in terms of cutting planes, iso-surfaces, particle tracing and vector fields are included in this system. This paper discusses improvements to the pV3 system developed under NASA's Affordable High Performance Computing project.

Edwards, David E.↗

Earth Science Observations, Analysis and Visualization: Roots in the 60's: Vision for the Next Millennium

The Etheater presents visualizations which span the period from the original Suomi/Hasler animations of the first ATS-1 GEO weather satellite images in 1966 ... to the latest 1999 NASA Earth Science Vision for the next 25 years. Hot off the SGI-Onyx Graphics-Supercomputer are NASA's visualizations of Hurricanes Mitch, Georges, Fran and Linda. These storms have been recently featured on the covers of National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and Popular Science. Highlights will be shown from the NASA hurricane visualization resource video tape that has been used repeatedly this season on National and International network TV. Results will be presented from a new paper on automatic wind measurements in Hurricane Luis from 1-min GOES images that appeared in the November BAMS.

Hasler, A. F.↗

Inspection of Space Station Cold Plate Using Visual and Automated Holographic Techniques

Real-time holography has been used to confirm the presence of non-uniformity in the construction of an International Space Station cold plate. Ultrasonic C-scans have previously shown suspected areas of cooling fin disbonds. But both neural-net processed and visual holography did not evidence any progressive permanent changes resulting from 3000 pressurization and relaxation cycles of a Dash 8 cold plate. Neural-net and visual inspections were performed of characteristic patterns generated from electronic time-average holograms of the vibrating cold plate. Normal modes of vibration were excited at very low amplitudes for this purpose, The neural nets were trained to flag very small changes in the mode shapes as encoded in the characteristic patterns. Both the whole cold plate and a zoomed region were inspected. The inspections were conducted before, after, and during pressurization and relaxation cycles of the cold plate. A water-filled cold plate was pressurized to 120 psig (827 kPa) and relaxed for each cycle. Each cycle required 5 seconds. Both the artificial neural networks and the inspectors were unable to detect changes in the mode shapes of the relaxed cold plate. The cold plate was also inspected visually using real-time holography and double-exposure holography. Regions of non-uniformity correlating with the C-scans were apparent, but the interference patterns did not change after 3000 pressurization and relaxation cycles. These tests constituted the first practical application of a neural-net inspection technique developed originally with support from the Director's Discretionary Fund at the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field.

Decker, Arthur J.↗

Multimodal Preception and Multicriterion Control of Nested Systems: A Functional Visual Assessment Test for Human Health Maintenance and Countermeasure Evaluation - 3

Our theoretical and empirical research on the whole-body coordination during locomotion led to a Phase 1 SBIR grant from NASA JSC. The purpose of the SBIR grant was to design an innovative system for evaluating eye-head-trunk coordination during whole-body perturbations that are characteristic of locomotion. The approach we used to satisfy the Phase 1 objectives was based on a structured methodology for the development of human-systems technology. Accordingly the project was broken down into a number of tasks and subtasks. In sequence, the major tasks were: (1) identify needs for functional assessment of visual acuity under conditions involving whole-body perturbation within the NASA Space Medical Monitoring and Countermeasures (SMMaC) program and in other related markets; (2) analyze the needs into the causes and symptoms of impaired visual acuity under conditions involving whole-body perturbation; (3) translate the analyzed needs into technology requirements for the Functional Visual Assessment Test (FVAT); (4) identify candidate technology solutions and implementations of FVAT; and (5) prioritize and select technology solutions. The work conducted in these tasks is described in this final volume of the series on Multimodal Perception and Multicriterion Control of Nested Systems. While prior volumes (1 and 2) in the series focus on theoretical foundations and novel data-analytic techniques, this volume addresses technology that is necessary for minimally intrusive data collection and near-real-time data analysis and display.

Riccio, Gary E.↗

Effect of Gradual Onset +G(sub z) Acceleration on Rate of Visual Field Collapse and Intraocular Pressure

The mechanisms that control the size of the visual field during positive acceleration are poorly understood, but involve mainly the arterial blood pressure at the eye level and intraocular pressure (IOP) (3). Fluid and electrolyte shifts that occur in the general circulation during acceleration may well influence the rate at which the visual field collapses. This could, in turn, suggest the relative influences that arterial blood pressure, IOP, and various compensatory mechanisms have upon acceleration tolerance. Such knowledge could also be of use in the design and development of protective techniques for use in the acceleration environment. The present investigation was performed to study blood withdrawal (hypovolemia) and subsequent reinfusion, oral fluid replacement upon IOP, and the rate at which the visual field collapses during gradual onset +G(sub z) acceleration (0.5 G/min).

Haines, Richard F.↗

Earth Science Observations, Analysis and Visualization: Roots in the 60's - Vision for the Next Millennium

The Etheater presents visualizations which span the period from the original Suomi/Hasler animations of the first ATS-1 GEO weather satellite images in 1966....... to the latest 1999 NASA Earth Science Vision for the next 25 years. Hot off the SGI-Onyx Graphics-Supercomputer are NASA's visualizations of Hurricanes Mitch, Georges, Fran and Linda. These storms have been recently featured on the covers of National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and Popular Science. Highlights will be shown from the NASA hurricane visualization resource video tape in standard and HDTV that has been used repeatedly this season on National and International network TV. Results will be presented from a new paper on automatic wind measurements in Hurricane Luis from 1-min GOES images that appeared in the November BAMS.

Hasler, A. Fritz↗

NASA/NOAA Earth Science Electronic Theater 1999. Earth Science Observations, Analysis and Visualization: Roots in the 60s: Vision for the Next Millennium

The Etheater presents visualizations which span the period from the original Suomi/Hasler animations of the first ATS-1 GEO weather satellite images in 1966 ....... to the latest 1999 NASA Earth Science Vision for the next 25 years. Hot off the SGI-Onyx Graphics-Supercomputer are NASA's visualizations of Hurricanes Mitch, Georges, Fran and Linda. These storms have been recently featured on the covers of National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and Popular Science. Highlights will be shown from the NASA hurricane visualization resource video tape in standard and HDTV that has been used repeatedly this season on National and International network TV. Results will be presented from a new paper on automatic wind measurements in Hurricane Luis from 1-min GOES images that appeared in the November BAMS.

Hasler, Fritz↗

Large Field Visualization with Demand-Driven Calculation

We present a system designed for the interactive definition and visualization of fields derived from large data sets: the Demand-Driven Visualizer (DDV). The system allows the user to write arbitrary expressions to define new fields, and then apply a variety of visualization techniques to the result. Expressions can include differential operators and numerous other built-in functions, ail of which are evaluated at specific field locations completely on demand. The payoff of following a demand-driven design philosophy throughout becomes particularly evident when working with large time-series data, where the costs of eager evaluation alternatives can be prohibitive.

Moran, Patrick J.↗

Investigation of Flow Separation in a Transonic-fan Linear Cascade Using Visualization Methods

An extensive study into the nature of the separated flows on the suction side of modem transonic fan airfoils at high incidence is described in the paper. Suction surface.flow separation is an important flow characteristic that may significantly contribute to stall flutter in transonic fans. Flutter in axial turbomachines is a highly undesirable and dangerous self-excited mode of blade oscillations that can result in high cycle fatigue blade failure. The study basically focused on two visualization techniques: surface flow visualization using dye oils, and schlieren (and shadowgraph) flow visualization. The following key observations were made during the study. For subsonic inlet flow, the flow on the suction side of the blade is separated over a large portion of the blade, and the separated area increases with increasing inlet Mach number. For the supersonic inlet flow condition, the flow is attached from the leading edge up to the point where a bow shock from the upper neighboring blade hits the blade surface. Low cascade solidity, for the subsonic inlet flow, results in an increased area of separated flow. For supersonic flow conditions, a low solidity results in an improvement in flow over the suction surface. Finally, computational results modeling the transonic cascade flowfield illustrate our ability to simulate these flows numerically.

Lepicovsky, Jan↗

Performance Measurement, Visualization and Modeling of Parallel and Distributed Programs

This paper presents a methodology for debugging the performance of message-passing programs on both tightly coupled and loosely coupled distributed-memory machines. The AIMS (Automated Instrumentation and Monitoring System) toolkit, a suite of software tools for measurement and analysis of performance, is introduced and its application illustrated using several benchmark programs drawn from the field of computational fluid dynamics. AIMS includes (i) Xinstrument, a powerful source-code instrumentor, which supports both Fortran77 and C as well as a number of different message-passing libraries including Intel's NX Thinking Machines' CMMD, and PVM; (ii) Monitor, a library of timestamping and trace -collection routines that run on supercomputers (such as Intel's iPSC/860, Delta, and Paragon and Thinking Machines' CM5) as well as on networks of workstations (including Convex Cluster and SparcStations connected by a LAN); (iii) Visualization Kernel, a trace-animation facility that supports source-code clickback, simultaneous visualization of computation and communication patterns, as well as analysis of data movements; (iv) Statistics Kernel, an advanced profiling facility, that associates a variety of performance data with various syntactic components of a parallel program; (v) Index Kernel, a diagnostic tool that helps pinpoint performance bottlenecks through the use of abstract indices; (vi) Modeling Kernel, a facility for automated modeling of message-passing programs that supports both simulation -based and analytical approaches to performance prediction and scalability analysis; (vii) Intrusion Compensator, a utility for recovering true performance from observed performance by removing the overheads of monitoring and their effects on the communication pattern of the program; and (viii) Compatibility Tools, that convert AIMS-generated traces into formats used by other performance-visualization tools, such as ParaGraph, Pablo, and certain AVS/Explorer modules.

Yan, Jerry C.↗

Hiding the Disk and Network Latency of Out-of-Core Visualization

This paper describes an algorithm that improves the performance of application-controlled demand paging for out-of-core visualization by hiding the latency of reading data from both local disks or disks on remote servers. The performance improvements come from better overlapping the computation with the page reading process, and by performing multiple page reads in parallel. The paper includes measurements that show that the new multithreaded paging algorithm decreases the time needed to compute visualizations by one third when using one processor and reading data from local disk. The time needed when using one processor and reading data from remote disk decreased by two thirds. Visualization runs using data from remote disk actually ran faster than ones using data from local disk because the remote runs were able to make use of the remote server's high performance disk array.

Ellsworth, David↗

Audio-Visual Situational Awareness for General Aviation Pilots

Weather is one of the major causes of general aviation accidents. Researchers are addressing this problem from various perspectives including improving meteorological forecasting techniques, collecting additional weather data automatically via on-board sensors and "flight" modems, and improving weather data dissemination and presentation. We approach the problem from the improved presentation perspective and propose weather visualization and interaction methods tailored for general aviation pilots. Our system, Aviation Weather Data Visualization Environment (AWE), utilizes information visualization techniques, a direct manipulation graphical interface, and a speech-based interface to improve a pilot's situational awareness of relevant weather data. The system design is based on a user study and feedback from pilots.

Spirkovska, Lilly↗

Visual Alert System

A visual alert system resulted from circuitry developed by Applied Cybernetics Systems for Langley as part of a space related telemetry system. James Campman, Applied Cybernetics president, left the company and founded Grace Industries, Inc. to manufacture security devices based on the Langley technology. His visual alert system combines visual and audible alerts for hearing impaired people. The company also manufactures an arson detection device called the electronic nose, and is currently researching additional applications of the NASA technology.

Source record↗

Visualizing 2D Probability Distributions from Satellite Image-Derived Data

Creating maps of biophysical and geophysical variables using Earth Observing System (EOS) satellite image data is an important component of Earth science. These 2D maps have a single value at every location and standard techniques are used to visualize them. Current tools fall short, however, when it is necessary to describe a distribution of values at each location. Distributions may represent a frequency of occurrence over time, frequency of occurrence from multiple runs of an ensemble forecast or possible values from an uncertainty model. 'Distribution data sets' are described, then a case study is presented to visualize such 2D distributions. Distribution data sets are different from multivariate data sets in the sense that the values are for a single variable instead of multiple variables. Our case study data consists of multiple realizations of percent forest cover, generated using a geostatistical technique that combines ground measurements and satellite imagery to model uncertainty about forest cover. We present several approaches for analyzing and visualizing such data sets. The first is a pixel-wise analysis of the probability density functions for the 2D image while the second is an analysis of features identified within the image. Such pixel-wise and feature-wise views will give Earth scientists a more complete understanding of distribution data sets.

Kao, David↗