Mr. Sebastian Wyngaard
Tel: 021 658 2758
E-mail: swyngaard@csir.co.za

Scientific visualization (also referred to as visual data analysis) is the interactive display and analysis of data used to gain an understanding of and insight into the data in a system. From a computing perspective, scientific visualization forms part of a larger area of study known as visualization. This involves research in computer graphics, image processing, high performance computing, virtual environments, and a number of other areas. The same tools used for scientific visualization are often applied to animation and multimedia presentations.

Scientific visualisation is an emerging science that aims to develop fundamental ideas leading to general tools for real applications. Its pursuit is multidisciplinary in that it uses the same techniques across many areas of study. There is often the need to perform the real-time visualization of data from a variety of sources. The purview is thus information, scientific or engineering visualization and related problems such as computational steering or multivariate analysis. The approaches developed are general with the objective being to make them applicable to datasets of any size, while retaining high interactivity.