Visualization: a subjective point of view

Abstract

Visualization is a young and booming research field with a growing community and increasingly competitive conferences and journals. Often, the 1987 NSF Report on Visualization in Scientific Computing (by McCormick et al.) is seen as an important starting point into a more explicit form of visualization research. In the mid-nineties then information visualization shaped itself as an own research (sub-)field and recently we see again new developments, including the visual analytics initiative as started in 2005. Visualization is bound to deliver advantages to related application fields -- if no (application) user gains an advantage from using visualization, e.g., to speed up a process, to improve results, etc., then visualization cannot consider itself successful. There are many examples by now, where visualization was successfully applied, including biomedical applications, engineering, meteorology and climate research, business, and others. In this talk, I am giving my subjective view on the state of visualization as a research field and aim at carefully predicting a bit of its future.