IFIP Series on Computer Graphics – serie

Powerful new technology has been made available to researchers by an increasingly competitive workstation market. Papers from Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the U.S., to name a few of the countries represented in this volume, discuss how workstations are used in experiments and what impact this new technology will have on experiments. As usual for IFIP workshops, the emphasis in this volume is on the formulation of strategies for future research, the determination of new market areas, and the identification of new areas for workstation research. This is the first volume of a book series reporting the work of IFIP WG 5.10. The mission of this IFIP work- ing group is to promote, develop and encourage advancement of the field of computer graphics as a basic tool, as an enabling technology and as an important part of various application areas.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the Computer Graphics and Education '91 Conference, held from 4th to 6th Apri11991, in Begur, Spain. The conference was organised under the auspices of the International Federation for Information Processing (IPIP) Working Group 5.10 on Computer Graphics. The goal of the organisers was to take a forward look at the impact on education of anticipated developments in graphics and related technologies, such as multimedia, in the next five years. We felt that at a time when many educational establishments are facing financial stringency and when major changes are taking place in patterns of education and training, this could be valuable for both educators and companies developing the technology: for educators, because they are often too bogged down in day-to-day problems to undertake adequate forward planning, and for companies, to see some of the problems faced by educators and to see what their future requirements might be.

In the history of technology, many fields have passed from an initial stage of empirical recipes to a mature stage where work is based on formal theories and procedures. This transition is made possible through a process called "modeling". Also Computer Graphics as a separate field of Computer Science makes extensive use of formal theories and procedures of modeling, often derived from related disciplines such as mathematics and physics. Modeling makes different application results consistent, unifying varieties of techniques and formal approaches into a smaller number of models by generalizing and abstracting the knowledge in Computer Graphics. This volume presents a selection of research papers submitted to the conference "Modeling in Computer Graphics: Methods and Applications" held at the Research Area of the National Research Council in Genoa, Italy, on June 28 -July 1, 1993. This meeting was the ideal continuation of a previous conference organized in Tokyo, Japan, in April 1991. The success and the variety of research themes discussed at that meeting suggested to promote a new working conference on methods and applications of modeling to be held in Italy two years later.

With the increase in the amount and dimensionality of scientific data collected, new approaches to the design of displays of such data have become essential. The designers of visual and auditory displays of scientific data seek to harness perceptual processes for data exploration. The general aim is to provide ways for raw data, and the statistical and mathematical structures they comprise, to "speak for themselves" and, thereby, enable scientists to conduct exploratory, in addition to confirmatory analyses of their data. The present primary approach via visualization depends mainly on coding data as positions of visually distinguishable elements in a two- or three- dimen­ sional euclidean space, e.g., as discrete points comprising clusters in scatter-plot displays and as patches comprising the hills and valleys of statistical surfaces. These displays are immensely effective because the data are in a form that evokes natural perceptual processing of the data into impressions of the presence and spatial disposition of apparent materials, objects, and structures in the viewers apparent physical environment. The problem with this mode of display, however, is that its perceptual potency is largeiy exhausted at dimension three, while we increasingly face the need to explore data of much greater dimensionality. The challenge posed for visualization researchers is to develop new modes of display that can push the dimensionality of data displays higher while retaining the kind of perceptual potency needed for data exploration.