Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!hanauma!rick
From: rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Scientific Visualization
Message-ID: <23203@labrea.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 Jul 88 15:40:05 GMT
Sender: news@labrea.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini)
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Organization: Stanford University, Dept. of Geophysics
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An important contention made at a recent Bay Area SIGGRAPH on `Ten Unsolved
Problems in Computer Graphics' is the graphics goals of various disciplines
are different.  The entertainment industry desires realism; Art desires
aesthetics; CAD desires accuracy.  I contend that scientific visualization
desires PRECISION.  First, graphics makes a large set of numbers generated
from data measurements or simulation more graspable than in raw form.
Second, in my field-- earth observation and simulation-- the most interesting
parts of a dataset are the anomalous regions.  Extrapolating missing regions
(e.g. splines) or smoothing glitches (e.g. median filters) can often distort
or destroy essential features of an image if applied improperly.  I warn
against wholesale borrowing of Hollywood graphics techniques for scientific
visualization as I see happening at many supercomputer visualization centers.
Beauty is nice and often a result of scientific visualization, but should not
be a major goal.