Visualization and Spatial Perception

Abstract

Generally the expression "visualization" means data processing so that a human being can imagine the physical or other phenomena represented by the given data sets. Although the visual understanding is nearly understood exclusively the term should be extended to more general sense. Visualization covers many fields of computer science, like numerical computation, graphics, parallel and distributed processing etc. On the other hand the application field must be understood and the human perception must be understood and respected as well. Significant change caused by the latest technology development has brought traditional visualization closer to users especially to users of the Intel IA32 (PC) platform. Several features of visualization in this platform are described including some new results obtained recently and expected development and open problems as well.