Illustrative rendering techniques for visualization: Future of visualization or just another technique?

Illustrative rendering, often also depicted as non-photorealistic rendering1 or stylized rendering, employs abstraction techniques to convey the relevant information, and de-emphasize less important details. The question remains how this abstraction process is guided and in particular how can we ensure that relevant information is maintained. Consequently, research on illustrative rendering needs to address how the information is perceived by the human observer, next to the investigation of algorithmic aspects. In this panel, we discuss various aspects on this topic. Kwan-Liu Ma discusses how illustrative rendering can be used in scientifc visualization, and Bernhard Preim explores its use for the visualization in the medical imaging domain. Perception aspects are presented by Victoria Interrante. A different perspective, if illustrative rendering is useful for typical visualization problems, is added by Hans Hagen.