There’s a great writeup in this months issue of CGW that talks about the important of Data Visualization in the sciences. It covers the early work by Cruz-Neira in the CAVE, through the current differences between Europe and the US, and up to the current offerings from Cyviz and SGI. There’s alot of discussion as well about Remote Visualization & the difficulty in getting high-powered visualization tools and products down to the end-user.
For the future, there are probably two models that will be used most often by businesses, and that will be to have some form of visualization on site—the best that can be afforded by the company—and also some networked collaboration. Brum, making the case for on-site systems, points to a study performed by Volkswagen several years ago in which engineers were asked how likely they were to use a visualization center if it was off-site, in another building, down the hall, or at the desktop. Like the people Briggs is working with at Headwave, most users said they might walk down the hall but they’d prefer to sit at their own desk.
The next step for visualization is to get all the realism of high-end visualization centers close to home. It seems clear now that for visualization to be most useful, it has to be down the hall and at the desk, but what hall, and what desk? And as Snepvangers points out, collaboration, increasingly, is not real time.
Also, at the end there’s a good writeup from Bob Pette, VP of SGI’s Visualization Group, discussing the new “VUE” product line.
