Scientific Visualization

Summary

One of the important themes being nurtured under the aegis of Scientific Visualization is the utilization of the broad bandwidth of the human sensory system in steering and interpreting complex processes and simulations involving voluminous data sets across diverse scientific disciplines. Since vision dominates our sensory input, strong efforts have been made to bring the power of mathematical abstraction and modeling to our eyes through the mediation of computer graphics. This interplay between various application areas and their specific problem solving visualization techniques has been emphasized in this seminar.

The second Dagstuhl Seminar on Scientific Visualization brought together researchers from USA (17), Germany (12), Great Britain (1), The Netherlands (4), France (1), Australia (1), Switzerland (1), and Russia (1). The Contributions reflected the heterogeneous structure of the parts of scientific visualization we decided to concentrate on. Presentations were given e. g. in flow visualization, visualization techniques in software development, volume visualization, medical imaging, and visualization of vector and tensor fields. The heterogeneity concerned the application as well as the methods by which the problems were attacked.

In contrast to usual conferences the atmosphere of Dagstuhl strongly supports the exchange of ideas. It was a pleasure to see the always well occupied audience and to follow the extensive and intensive discussions after the talks. The results of this very successful seminar will be published in a book. The idea is not to produce a proccedings volume but an edited book containing tutorial-like sections as well as recent original work.