An Evaluation of Glyph Perception for Real Symmetric Traceless Tensor Properties

A perceptual study of four tensor glyphs for symmetric, real, traceless tensors was performed. Each glyph encodes three properties of the system: Orientation, uniaxiality (alignment along the direction of orientation), and biaxiality (alignment along a vector orthogonal to the orientation). Thirty users over two studies were asked to identify these three properties for each glyph type under a variety of permutations in order to evaluate the effectiveness of visually communicating the properties; response time was also measured. We discuss the significant differences found between the methods as guidance to the use of these glyphs for traceless tensor visualization.