George Robertson of Microsoft Research ( http://www.research.microsoft.com/~ggr) is best known for his work at Xerox Parc on the “Information Visualizer”. His keynote speech, entitled "Leveraging Human Capabilities in Information Perceptualization", was very interesting. His slides are available online at http://www.research.microsoft.com/~ggr/infovis98.ppt. His introduction sought to provide a introduction and definition of Information Visualization. He quoted Richard Mark Friedhoff’s keynote speech from Vis91 for a defintion of visualization:
“substitution of pre-attentive visual compentencies for concious thought”
George divided visualization into three broad categories: Scientific (physical), Data (quantitative) and Information (abstract). He noted that while Moore’s Law sees computer power doubling every 18 months, the capabilities of 3D graphics systems are doubling much faster , about every 6-8 months. He said Microsoft predicts rates of 200 Million polygons per second by 2001 and by 2011 we will have systems 1000 times faster. There are about 30 companies working on low cost, high performance 3D texture mapped systems. These are mostly tuned to other tasks than information visualization. This is most notably by their lack of support for 3D text. Textual displays in 3D are often done using crude texture maps and readability suffers greatly. He noted we need layers that map the visual techniques to information sources. He noted four areas for information visualization research:
He laid out two main challenges for the community: Usability and Perceptualization.