nd Visualization

Last Friday I had an opportunity to meet the guys behind Curvaceous who have a suite of Geometric Process Control tools.

Although at first glance it appears to be a multi-variable plot it is actually a visualization of a n'th dimensional structure. This visualization technique enables engineers to quickly see the optimal settings for their process. The plot is made using nd->2d transformations and then they have a form of query language in order to filter / rearrange the ranges and axes in order to highlight and discover the relevant information. They have multiple patents on the innovative techniques involved. This enables site engineers to rapidly control and adjust the production process in order to maintain consistant output.

Good stuff!  Unfortunately their website doesn't give a full idea or demonstation of what they do but if you are in need of Process Control software that can handle thousands of sensor inputs, masses of historical data and present it in an easy to use fashion you won't go wrong with their Geometric Process Control Tool Suite.

Feeling inspired by their technique I came up with a very simplistic visualization of a ball bouncing (in-elastic case).  I made a slight modification of allowing an axis to be rotated into a 3rd dimension in order to aid visualization. In this case I rotated the time axis. See below for screenshots.  Although this is a very simplistic case it really demonstrates the power of the technique.



The t,x,y,z axes are coloured in white, red, green and blue respectively. The little cube just gives a frame of reference for the bouncing ball line.  As you can see there is no way to represent the time in the 3d plot.

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Click to zoom in - as the lines get a bit lost in the scaled down images.