Keynote Address

Summary form only given. The discipline of volume visualization has come a long way. Real-time volume rendering on commodity hardware is now commonplace. Many theoretical aspects of volume modeling and volume visualization have been studied in detail. And the commercial impact of volume visualization is respectable, especially in medical and geophysical applications. Yet, many people share the feeling that the field is becoming stagnant, that too much research focuses on incremental algorithmic improvements, and that we have become disconnected from the scientists, engineers, and doctors who need volume visualization. The question is: where do we go from here? In this talk I will first take stock of the state-of-the art in volume visualization. Our community has a lot to be proud of, and we should celebrate our achievements. In particular, I will show the progress we have made since the seminal NSF report "Visualization in Scientific Computing" was published in 1987. I will point out which of the grand challenges in that report have been overcome with progress in technology, and which problems have proven to be fundamentally harder to solve. The second part of my talk will focus on the future challenges in volume visualization. I will argue that realtime volume rendering is - for all practical purposes - a solved issue. Instead, we need to focus on the principal goal of volume visualization: to convey information with graphical techniques. This simple statement raises many useful questions: how do we convey information effectively? How do we measure effectiveness? What are appropriate forms of visual abstraction? What forms of user interaction are most effective to gain insights? How can technology assist us in conveying information more effectively? There are no clear-cut answers to these questions. Instead, I will demonstrate the issues on some real-life applications and show how we can investigate the nature of visual communication and visual exploration. I will- argue that we have the potential to design tools that could have a very profound impact on future scientific progress and public understanding of research. The goal of my talk is to foster a better understanding of the challenges ahead, and to provide points of discussion that can assist in making the next big steps in volume visualization.