Domain Science Colaborations

Skeletal Motion

The analysis of skeletal motion is a primary area of research for paleontologists and biologists to gain insight into how extinct animals once moved on earth. Visualizing and measuring 3-D skeletal movement in living animals is possible with X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM), an animation-based technique developed at Brown University (xromm.org). However, exploring and analyzing patterns of movement from the wealth of multidimensional time-varying data generated from this method is complex, even just for a relatively simple joint between two bones, but notably so with multiple articulated bones, such as those in the foot. A unique large experimentally-collected dataset of alligator foot skeleton animations (figured) have been generated from the research of Morgan Turner, a paleontologist, biologist, and artist collaborating with the Sculpting Vis Collaborative. This dataset is not only particularly useful in the study of locomotor evolution in extinct dinosaurs and relatives, but also serves as the core dataset for development of new visualization techniques to support data discovery and analysis of spatial and temporal skeletal motion patterns. Artifact-Based Rendering (ABR) is used as the graphics engine to render motion tracers, bones, and other 3-D components within a domain-focused application.