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Conclusions

So, I feel that the superquadric glyphs are a better tool for inspecting individual tensor values.

The idea is that if you have a simple but expressive glyph geometry, then all of its other degrees of freedom (color and other surface properties) can be used to convey other aspects of the information.

Also, its easy to use the parametric version of the superquadric equations to implement these in your own tools.

I'm working now in some ideas on how to come up with a more principled choice of gamma. And I should point out that this method can work with negative eigenvalues if you follow the example of Kirby in his 1999 2-D flow-viz paper. Also, you can extend other tensor vis methods like hyperstreamlines with the ideas here- by making the cross-section of the streamline into a super-ellipse.