Volume 51, Issue 3

An emerging interaction design methodology is presented; it addresses the benefits of incorporating domain-specific knowledge into the interface. The methodology is informally described using three real-world examples, exposing how findings from Visual Perception, Psycholinguistics, and Cognitive Science can be applied to the design process. Tying the design process back to science can help us to understand why current standard-widget toolkits are suboptimal for many domains. It can also inform the development of tools and intellectual approaches valuable at various stages of design.

As the field of informatics matures, the range of disciplines that contribute to our understanding of information systems and their use must increase. The International Symposium on Smart Graphics is one of the pioneers of this interdisciplinary scholarship of computation. The highly interactive workshop format includes participants from cognitive and perceptual sciences, art and design, and the humanities as well as the more familiar disciplines of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and computer graphics. This paper describes how the new science of visual analytics has built upon the interdisciplinary conversations that events such as Smart Graphics began. This new field of research holds a great deal of promise for a variety of application areas, and serves as an example of how the Smart Graphics approach can support other emerging fields of study.

The declarative design of graphics lies at the core of the Smart Graphics research agenda. For 3D graphics the number of lights included, and the properties of these lights, has an enormous impact on what a viewer can judge about the content (the objects), properties (the geometric characteristics and spatial relations of the objects) and other aesthetic qualities of a scene. The traditional approach to lighting design for image synthesis is based on manual design methods, whereby users interactively specify values of lighting parameters, render the scene, and modify the lighting parameters until the desired visual properties of the scene are achieved. Non-expert users encounter a number of difficulties in selecting the appropriate lighting parameters, as the process requires both a subtle technical and aesthetic understanding of lighting in computer graphics. We review range of “smart” lighting design and steady slow convergence on ideal lighting approaches which optimise the lighting configuration for a scene with respect to a set of absolute perceptual metrics. More recently perceptual approaches have been combined with aspects of exemplar driven approaches to yield “lighting-by-example” techniques that can replicate the lighting of existing static 2D images and 3D scenes.

Smart graphics techniques have a great potential in supporting medical treatment planning and education. In particular, the use of high-level knowledge and carefully selected default values reduces the interaction effort in exploring complex 3D data sets. Automatic viewpoint selection techniques may support the exploration of patient-specific 3D models. Camera movements and other animation techniques allow to emphasize important anatomic structures and convey complex spatial relations. Illustrative rendering techniques and smart visibility techniques enable the expressive visualization of nested surfaces which is important, e. g., to understand the location of a tumor inside an organ. General smart graphics techniques, however, have to be carefully adapted to support medical applications. In-depth discussions of usage scenarios, requirements, priorities and preferences are therefore a prerequisite for successful developments. In this paper, we give an overview of smart medical visualizations.

Navigation represents a fundamental interaction technique for 3D virtual environments (3DVEs) — it enables users to explore the virtual world and to interact with its objects. For this, effective navigation techniques are required that take into account users and their goals. They also should prevent common problems of 3D navigation, such as an intricate camera control or “getting-lost” situations due to incoherent and confusing camera views. Smart navigation aims at this category of navigation techniques; it represents a special type of smart interaction and, thus, an essential element of smart graphics. This article presents the conceptual building blocks of smart navigation for 3DVEs and describes a navigation technique that allows for specifying navigation commands by sketches and gestures: Users sketch their navigation intentions on top of the perspective projection of the 3D scene; the system interprets these sketches regarding the affected scene geometry, as well as the spatial and temporal context. Based on this interpretation, navigation activities are derived and automatically performed. By providing assistance and automation, the smart navigation approach can substantially simplify user interfaces for 3DVEs and, thus, represents an essential component for novel applications of 3DVEs, e. g., based on touch-sensitive displays.

Zusammenfassung Viele kombinatorische Probleme aus der Praxis sind NP-schwer; zu ihrer Lösung werden meist Heuristiken verwendet. Parametrisierte Komplexität ist ein neuerer Ansatz, der versucht, Strukturen von Praxisinstanzen auszunutzen. Ziel der Arbeit war es zu belegen, dass parametrisierte Komplexität, und insbesondere neuartige algorithmische Techniken, deren Entwicklung auf dieses Konzept zurückgeht, tatsächlich zu einsetzbaren Programmen für die exakte Lösung von Praxisinstanzen führt. Wir zeigen dies hier am Beispiel der Graphprobleme Clique Cover und Minimum-Weight Path, die Anwendungen in der Bioinformatik und anderen Gebieten haben.