An interaction model for scientific visualization using sound

In scientific visualization, interaction tools allow users to navigate through volume and explore its features, helping information understanding. The use of sound as a data display tool (sonification) has also been shown to support information understanding and may help dealing with adding dimensions to a visual display. However, thus far the issues of data exploration tools and sonification have been treated separately by the visualization community. We present an interaction model for scientific visualization that considers the main issues related to sonification, and shows a prototype implemented to illustrate the proposed model. The prototype is a class library that implements a number of interaction tools with sonification functions, which is freely available and can be employed in general purpose visualization applications.