Metamorphers

Abstract

In molecular biology, illustrative animations are used to convey complex biological phenomena to broad audiences. However, such animations have to be manually authored in 3D modeling software, a time consuming task that has to be repeated from scratch for every new data set, and requires a high level of expertise in illustration, animation, and biology. We therefore propose metamorphers: a set of operations for defining animation states as well as the transitions to them in the form of re-usable storytelling templates. The re-usability is two-fold. Firstly, due to their modular nature, metamorphers can be re-used in different combinations to create a wide range of animations. Secondly, due to their abstract nature, metamorphers can be re-used to re-create an intended animation for a wide range of compatible data sets. Metamorphers thereby mask the low-level complexity of explicit animation specifications by exploiting the inherent properties of the molecular data, such as the position, size, and hierarchy level of a semantic data subset. We demonstrate the re-usability of our technique based on the authoring and application of two animation use-cases to three molecular data sets.