IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications

Back to Digital Crayons

Cover artist Tom Hubbard discusses how he transformed from taking realistic photographs to the world of creating abstract digital art.

Bert Herzog, 1929 2008: Remembrances and Recollections

This In Memoriam pays tribute to Bert Herzog, former editor in chief of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. Friends and colleagues remember this computer graphics pioneer as someone who guided, mentored, and inspired them to achieve the best in themselves.

Bringing VR and Spatial 3D Interaction to the Masses through Video Games

This article examines why innovations such as the Sony EyeToy and Nintendo Wii have been so successful and discusses the research opportunities presented by the latest commercial push for spatial 3D interaction in games.

A Prototype for Cartographic Human Body Analysis

A cartographic-oriented model uses algebraic map operations to perform spatial analysis of medical data relative to the human body. A prototype system uses 3D visualization techniques to deliver analysis results. A prototype implementation suggests the model might provide the basis for a medical application tool that introduces new information insight.

Visualization Research is Growing and Expanding

Visualization has become an increasingly active area of research because of its usefulness in a wide range of applications. This special issue features invited articles from PacificVis 2008 and highlights the state of the art in visualization algorithms, systems, and applications.

Visualizing Transport Structures of Time-Dependent Flow Fields

This article focuses on the transport characteristics of physical properties in fluids—in particular, visualizing the finite-time transport structure of property advection. Applied to a well-chosen set of property fields, the proposed approach yields structures giving insights into the underlying flow's dynamic processes.

Seeing the Difference between Cosmological Simulations

As cosmology simulations help us understand the universe, we must understand how the results of different simulations vary. Visualization and modern graphics hardware can now provide the ability to visually explore these differences interactively.

Event Tunnel: Exploring Event-Driven Business Processes

Event-based systems monitor business processes in real time. The event-tunnel visualization sees the stream of events captured from such systems as a cylindrical tunnel. The tunnel allows for back-tracing business incidents and exploring event patterns' root causes. The authors couple this visualization with tools that let users search for relevant events within a data repository.

Map Warping for the Annotation of Metro Maps

Schematic transportation maps usually contain little or no detail describing the environment of stations or their embedding in the surrounding area. The annotation of a distorted city map alleviates this deficiency and further improves the usability of schematic transportation maps by merging two different navigational spaces.

Dynamic Shader Generation for GPU-Based Multi-Volume Ray Casting

Real-time performance for rendering multiple intersecting volumetric objects requires the speed and flexibility of modern GPUs. This requirement has restricted programming of the necessary shaders to GPU experts only. A visualization system that dynamically generates GPU shaders for multi-volume ray casting from a user-definable abstract render graph overcomes this limitation.

The Need for Verifiable Visualization

Visualization is often employed as part of the simulation science pipeline—it's the window through which scientists examine their data for deriving new science, and the lens used to view modeling and discretization interactions within their simulations. We advocate that as a component of the simulation science pipeline, visualization must be explicitly considered as part of the validation and verification (V&V) process. In this article, the authors define V&V in the context of computational science, discuss the role of V&V in the scientific process, and present arguments for the need for verifiable visualization.

Analyses Using VR/AR Visualization

Tools and Products

Department editor Dave Kasik highlights some of the new computer graphics tools and products on the market. In this issue the featured tools and products are the "Smart Camera" precision position tracking system from WorldViz; the Nvidia Quadro FX 3600M professional GPU for notebook and laptop workstations; the OpticBook 4600 book scanner from Plustek Technology; a news item on the unveiling of the world's highest-resolution display system for scientific visualization at the University of California, San Diego; an advanced indicator from TransLumen; enhancements to the Knights Camelot CAD navigation tool from Magma Design Automation; and a 3D application from CityEngine that can generate models of cities up to 10 times faster than previous applications.