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Contents  
Foreword by Walter Cronkite  
Introduction - The National Science Foundation at 50: Where Discoveries Begin, by Rita Colwell  
Internet: Changing the Way we Communicate  
Advanced Materials: The Stuff Dreams are Made of  
Education: Lessons about Learning  
Manufacturing: The Forms of Things Unknown  
Arabidopsis: Map-makers of the Plant Kingdom  
Decision Sciences: How the Game is Played  
Visualization: A Way to See the Unseen
Environment: Taking the Long View  
Astronomy: Exploring the Expanding Universe  
Science on the Edge: Arctic and Antarctic Discoveries  
Disaster & Hazard Mitigation  
About the Photographs  
Acknowledgments  
About the NSF  
Chapter Index  
Visualization: A way to see the unseen
 

Visualization: Back to the Future

By 1991, the field of computer visualization was exploding. "The field had gotten so big, with so many specialties, that no one could know it all. No single research lab could do it all. Graphics hadn't just become broad—it was increasingly interdisciplinary," explains Andries van Dam of Brown University. Van Dam is the current director of NSF's Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization, which was established both to help deal with the interdisciplinary needs of the scientists and to expand the basics of computer graphics.

The center is a consortium of research groups from five institutions—Brown University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Utah—all of which have a history of cutting-edge research in computer graphics and visualization.

In addition to collaborating, each university focuses on a different part of graphics and visualization research, studying such fields as novel user interfaces, hardware design for visualization and graphics, the physics of the interaction of light with its environment, and geometric modeling for mechanical design.

Another of the Center's focuses, explains van Dam, is tele-collaboration. "We are building tools that will make it seem like you're looking through a glass window and seeing your colleagues in the next room working on objects you're designing. We want to create an immersive environment. In my lifetime it won't be quite real, but it will be close enough."

 
     
PDF Version
Overview
Visualizing Science in Action
Worth? Data Points
Art & Science? to Numbers
Staking the Pioneers: The 1960s - 1990s
Visualization: Back to the Future
Visualizing a Virtual Reality
Computer Graphics: A Competitive Edge
A Panoply of Applications
Computer Grapihics: Into the Marketplace
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