Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

The simulation of complex events is a challenging task and often requires careful selection of simulation parameters. With the availability of vast computation resources, it has become possible to run several alternative parameter settings or simulation models in parallel, creating an 'ensemble' of possible outcomes for a given event of interest. Recently, the visual analysis of such ensemble data has repeatedly come up as one of the most important new areas of visualization and it is expected to have a wide impact on the field of visualization in the next few years. The main challenge is to develop expressive visualizations of properties of this set of solutions, the ensemble, to support scientists in this challenging parameter-space exploration task. This paper presents and explores future challenges for ensemble visualization.