Visualization of surface movement data using TIN-based temporal modeling approach

The research area of spatiotemporal visualization has received much attention over the past decade considering that visualization is very much needed for dealing with large and complex spatiotemporal datasets. In this paper we present the visualization of spatiotemporal data in the form of terrain surface movements. Many of previous spatiotemporal systems use the traditional method of animation frames to visualize movement data. This paper however took a different approach; by applying a TIN-based temporal modeling approach to the surface movement algorithm in a morphing simulation process. An additional temporal dimension t is added to the terrain spatial dimensions of x, y and z thus creating a suitable tool for spatiotemporal movement visualization. Through the use of morphing, the structures of terrain that changes over time can be viewed and navigated in detail. Furthermore, due to the chosen approach of morphing, we have also managed to come up with an enhancement of the Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) file format, which extends the advantages of our approach. A simple visualization tool was built to demonstrate this idea and we believe that with gradual improvements, it holds a very promising prospect to be commercialized.