• vrvis2012

Immersive Visualization Revisited – Challenges and Opportunities

This page holds the information for the IEEE VR 2012 Half-day workshop "Immersive Visualization Revisited", organized to revamp cross-community work in immersive visualization. The workshop had an attendance of over 30 enthusiasts, featured six talks (see below) and initiated interesting discussions on the topic. We will continue to organize these workshops, please join the Immersive Visualization Google Groups page to get updates.

The original call was Please submit your work , and join the discussion March 4th at IEEE VR 2012, Orange County, CA, USA. For comments or questions, please contact the workshop organizers (g.dehaan@tudelft.nl for now).

Workshop Organizers

• Gerwin de Haan (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
• Bernd Hentschel (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
• Daniel Keefe (University of Minnesota, USA)

Program

Abstract

Immersive visualization, i.e. the use of VR display and interaction technology for visual data exploration and analysis, has long been deemed one of the killer applications of Virtual Reality technology. However, VR research is nowadays mostly focused on training, simulation, and psychological experiments. Inspiring cross-community work on immersive visualization is largely going on behind the scenes, only to be revealed by anecdotal evidence, e.g. in informal discussions among colleagues.

The major goal of this workshop is to establish a forum for the presentation and discussion of contemporary cross-community work in immersive visualization. We hope to revive the contact between the nowadays largely separate communities of visualization and Virtual Reality. Consequently, the workshop will be structured into two parts:

• presentation of technical papers, position papers, and experience reports
• panel and break-out discussions with experts who have worked in both fields.

Call for Participation

In order to assess the state of the field and start a discussion about future challenges, we encourage the submission of short papers (up to 6 pages, but typically 4-6 pages, IEEE Computer Society layout). Successful submissions should integrate ideas from both, Virtual Reality and visual data analysis, and clearly elaborate on how the VR aspects helped solve the problem at hand. In addition to technical papers, we encourage the submission of position papers (typically 2 pages) in order to help spark further discussions. Papers will be peer-reviewed and authors of accepted papers are given the opportunity to do a 10-15 min presentation at the workshop. For this first workshop, the submitted papers will be bundled and put online. From the final submissions and the panel discussions we will invite authors to initiate formal publications that reflects our findings. Furthermore, we plan to organize a similar workshop at the upcoming IEEE Visweek Visualization conference.

Organizers Biographies

• Gerwin de Haan is assistant professor in the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. During his PhD he worked on various topics of interactive (scientific) data visualization in Virtual Environments, such as interaction, display and software development. The main focus of his recent Post-Doctoral position was the integrated VR visualization of massive point cloud data sets and flooding simulations. Other fields of research interest include visual interfaces for video surveillance and projected augmented reality. Contact him at g.dehaan@tudelft.nl.

• Bernd Hentschel is a senior researcher with the Virtual Reality Group, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His research interests include the analysis of domain-specific features in large simulation data, parallel visualization algorithms, and immersive visualization. During his studies he has closely collaborated with domain scientists in order to find ways to leverage the benefits of virtual reality-based user interfaces for complex visual data analysis problems. He holds a MSc. degree in computer science (Dipl.-Inform.) and a PhD., both from RWTH. Contact him at hentschel@vr.rwth-aachen.de.

• Dan Keefe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.  His research centers on data visualization (visualization of time-varying multidimensional data, visualization at scale, perceptually optimized visualization), interactive computer graphics (3D interfaces, haptics, pen and multi-touch input), and computational creativity (design and creativity support tools, synergies between art and science).  Keefe received the NSF CAREER Award in 2011. He did post-doctoral work at Brown University where he received the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007.  He received the B.S. in Computer Engineering summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1999. Contact him at keefe@cs.umn.edu.

Important dates

Please submit through e-mail to the workshop (one or all) organisers. The sooner you send in an abstract, the better we are able to guide the review process.