VIS Panels: Molecules to Humankind: Challenges in Multiscale Visualization

Session chair:Andreas Bueckle, Christiane V. R. Hütter, Jörg Menche, Katy Börner

Room:America South

Time:Tuesday, Nov 10 @ 13:00 - 14:30 (US/Eastern)

Website:https://cns-iu.github.io/cns-multiscale-vis-panel-2026/

Life's complexity, from molecular interactions to the human body, spans over 10 orders of magnitude, a fundamental challenge for data visualization. Our panel, “Molecules to Humankind: Challenges in Multiscale Visualization”, brings together five experts across astrophysics, computer science, visualization, graphics, and biology to debate the state of the art and identify productive areas of disagreement in this emerging field. While multiscale reasoning appears across many visualization domains, the IEEE VIS community has not yet had a dedicated venue to synthesize common challenges, design principles, and open research questions around multiscale visualization. The panel centers on foundational design tensions. When is bridging scales necessary, and when are explicit breaks preferable to reduce cognitive load? Should multiscale data be integrated into a single coherent environment or connected through specialized views optimized for different data types and tasks? How should visual encodings, interaction techniques, and transitions evolve across scales while staying coherent, interpretable, and scientifically accurate? We will examine competing design philosophies using examples from the panelists' research, which spans interactive molecular visualization, immersive analytics, scientific visualization, and astrophysics, to identify transferable principles as well as unresolved challenges. Rather than seeking consensus, the discussion will emphasize trade-offs between alternative approaches and highlight open questions for the wider VIS community. To encourage active participation, attendees will contribute to a collaborative multiscale basemap by marking the spatial scales of their own research, which will create a shared visualization of the community's expertise that serves as a catalyst for discussion, reflection, and future collaborations.

Presentations in this session