Cinematic scientific visualization

Cinematic scientific visualization (CSV) is the visual presentation of scientific data in a way that is typically associated with non-scientific filmmaking techniques including cinematography, lighting, and composition. Cinematic scientific visualizations are often created for purposes of science communication to the general public, e.g. through museum exhibits and documentary films.^[1] CSV is considered a subfield of scientific visualization, although the creation methods and visual outputs differ due to CSV's heavy emphasis on aesthetics and design.

Traditional scientific visualization and cinematic scientific visualization differ in a number of important ways:

The first large scale broadly-distributed cinematic scientific visualization appeared in the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage in 1996, though at the time this was simply referred to as a "scientific visualization" without the "cinematic" qualifier.^[2] The term "cinematic scientific visualization" was first published by Donna Cox in 2008 referring to work created by the Advanced Visualization Lab^[3] and was popularized by Kalina Borkiewicz of the same lab who published a series of papers, conference presentations, and interviews on the topic beginning in 2017.^{[4][5][6][7][1]} The term is now widely used to describe work done by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio,^[8] Siemens Healthineers,^[9] NVIDIA,^[10] and others.

In 2014, the film Interstellar featured a cinematic scientific visualization of a physically-accurate black hole in a science fiction film.^[11]