Energy balance: A web-based visualization of energy for automotive engineering using X3DOM

Automotive systems can be very complex when using multiple forms of energy. To achieve better energy efficiency, engineers require specialized tools to cope with that complexity and to comprehend how energy is spread and consumed. This is especially essential to develop hybrid systems, which generate electricity by various available forms of energy. Therefore, highly specialized visualizations of multiple measured energies are needed. This paper examines several three-dimensional glyph-based visualization techniques for spatial multivariate data. Besides animated glyphs, two-dimensional visualization techniques for temporal data to allow detailed trend analysis are considered as well. Investigations revealed that Scaled Data-Driven Spheres are best suited for a detailed 3D exploration of measured data. To gain a better overview of the spatial data, Cumulative Glyphs are introduced. For trend analysis, Theme River and Stacked Area Graphs are used. All these visualization techniques are implemented as a web-based prototype without the need of additional web browser plugins using X3DOM and Data-Driven Documents.