Presenting data in 3D

The way in which researchers can present their data in online publications has been revolutionised thanks to a new software technique developed by staff at Swinburne University.

Dr David Barnes and Dr Christopher Fluke from Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing developed the new technique to allow interactive three dimensional visualisations to be embedded into Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

In recent years there has been a dramatic change in how research articles are published, with a steady trend away from physical, paper-based journals to fully online digital publications. Despite this, data sets in published papers have remained two dimensional, incorporating a series of static views.

This new technique allows researchers to present their papers so that readers can interact with 3D data. Readers can easily rotate and explore 3D models, and can even highlight particular elements from a data set. This has been highly useful for astronomy data sets, such as representing the dark matter halos that surround galaxies. These complex structures can only be fully appreciated via interactive 3D visualisations.