File last modified 4 January 1999
Throughout this course we have been stressing the ways in which we can use the scalpels of mathematics to slice-and-dice our perception of the real world. We stressed that mathematics in-and-of-itself has no link with reality, but as a language to describe what we perceive with our senses it is very powerful. In the end, it is only that which we perceive with our senses that can pass for "reality", in a Kantian sense of the word.
But once you have used this language to describe your concept of reality (represented either by measurements you have made or by models you have built), how do you perceive this mathematical representation? The answer lies in what we have come to call "scientific visualization". This phrase has taken on many guises and manifestations recently, but here we will try to restrict ourselves to the sensory (largely visual) perception of data, data analysis, and model output.
As we try to represent in Fig. 24.1.1, something happens between your ears when you "see" your data. In scientific visualization this "seeing" is mostly done literally with your eyes (although sound is quite often used to supplement the visual perception). In this sense your eyes are your detectors and what you see has been "filtered" by them.
Essentially when you are presenting your data, data analysis/reduction, or model output you are distorting your data. With computers you manipulate the data to trigger something in your mind. In this last lecture of the course we will try to present to you some of the better known aspects of visualizing scientific data. In the next section we will discuss the range of options available to you in MatLab (as best we can, The MathWorks are constantly adding new visualization capabilities and we cannot know all of the possibilities that exists currently). We will, in a further section, discuss briefly some other software packages that can be used in an "off-line" fashion with output from MatLab (indeed some provide the ability to interface seamlessly with MatLab so that you are not aware of switching from one software package to another). And finally we will discuss some of the aspects of the psychology and physiology of visualization itself.
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