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In our ongoing quest to convey more information more clearly in a single image, harnessing the full potential of texture for data representation remains an elusive goal. Others have begun excellent work in this area,1-3 and my efforts are inspired by their example. The grail that I seek is a partially ordered multidimensional palette of richly detailed and varying texture patterns that can be used in conjunction with lightness and hue to represent multivariate information. The goal is to facilitate the flexible visual appreciation of the correlations of various quantities across the different dimensions. The approach that I outline here departs a bit from the norm, but is motivated by a desire to proceed more directly from my vision of what I want to achieve, unrestrained by the limitations of the tools I have on hand. In the following discussion, I motivate the adoption of rich, natural textures resembling those from photographic images4 as elemental primitives and sketch some of the approaches that we can take to enhance our understanding of how to effectively harness their properties. My intent here is not to present results, but to expound on the issues and conclude with the questions to which we re still seeking answers.

This article seeks to use texture to its fullest potential for data representation by seeking to find a partially ordered multi-dimensional palette of texture patterns. Specific to representing uncertainty, varying the regularity or color of texture are possible approaches. This paper also references papers that deal with texture generation and the use of texture and color in data visualization.

texture, visualization

Vary texture pattern irregularity, and texture hue with uncertainty.

@Article{	interrante:2000:HNTV,
author =	"Victoria Interrante",
title =	"Harnessing Natural Textures for Multivariate Visualization",
journal =	"IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications",
volume =	"20",
number =	"6",
pages =	"6--11",
month =	"November/December",
year =	"2000",
}