Interactive Visualization - Beyond Standard Techniques for Irrelevant Datasets

During the last 20 years visualization has developed into a scientific discipline of its own right at the crossroads of computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and data analysis. Today, interactive visualization techniques play a crucial role in the process of understanding the huge datasets resulting from simulations, sensor measurements, and information systems. The talk will look at the current state of the field which is characterized by the fact that by now elaborate algorithms and efficient GPU implementations exist for many classical visualization problems dealing with 3D scalar and vector data sets. Therefore, it has become obvious that future visualization research cannot only concentrate on optimizing standard techniques for well-known benchmark data sets. A closer cooperation with application domains very often leads to real-life problems whose size and dimension require new approaches often combining known techniques into innovative tools. In this context the talk will present some of the current research results of the visualization group at the University of Stuttgart in the areas of visualization of video streams, molecular dynamics simulations, and patent databases.