Version 2.0 The following people contributed in the writing of this report: (In alphabetical order)

Recent developments in vision science have resulted in several major changes in our understanding of human visual perception. For example, attention no longer appears necessary for “visual intelligence”—a large amount of sophisticated processing can be done without it. Scene perception no longer appears to involve static, general-purpose descriptions, but instead may involve dynamic representations whose content depends on the individual and the task. And vision itself no longer appears to be limited to the production of a conscious “picture”—it may also guide processes outside the conscious awareness of the observer. This chapter surveys some of these new developments and sketches the potential implications they have for the way that vision is modeled and controlled. Emphasis is placed on the emerging view that visual perception involves the sophisticated coordination of several quasi-independent systems, each with its own kind of intelligence. Several consequences of this view will be discussed, including new possibilities for human-machine interaction.

This paper describes how a link between Virtual Reality and Rapid Prototyping was established at Clemson to enhance the designer's understanding of manufacturing issues. It concentrates on the topic of support structures for rapid prototyping processes. The paper presents a survey of the literature in the area of Virtual Reality and discusses some of the issues of translating an STL model into the appropriate format for Virtual Reality. Too often, the support structures are either missing, or placed in locations that do not really require support. Visualizing these support structures is a tedious task, rarely performed, and problems are not discovered until the part is built. Virtual Reality is proposed as a tool to help designers and manufacturing engineers see and identify these problems before building the part. The virtual environment also provides the designer with a tool that was never dreamed of. The ability to penetrate a design, study it from inside or outside, scale it to a s...

The paper starts by discussing the role that Visualisation and Information Visualisation may have in the development of the next generation of user interfaces. An oriented review of issues involved in the creation of systems that take advantage of emergent computer 3D facilities and Virtual Reality systems are presented. Is defended the perspective that visualisation can promote the opportunity to foster user interaction mediated by technology. The paper ends up with a discussion of the design, architecture, and use of interactive visualisations in a system that allows the creation of a virtual world to assist knowledge sharing. The proposed system uses a 3D interactive visualisation interface to support user exploration and enhancement of the concept space. The concept space is somewhat a 3D semantic map, allowing users to define concepts by listing associated keywords. The proposed system design is briefly described in order to argue how visualisation, in particular 3D interactive visualisation, can be used for knowledge sharing support and group interaction. Applications of this system include information retrieval and indexing, and group knowledge sharing such as in educational settings. Keywords: visualisation, information visualisation, human factors, user interaction, virtual environments, knowledge sharing, cooperation and collaboration interfaces. 1

this paper, we present a new approach to the classification and visualization of navigation behavior that provides the researcher with quantitative measures, as well as with an easy-to-follow graphical representation for detailed qualitative analysis. In the following, we first discuss existing approaches to the classification and visualization of movement sequences that are important for understanding Web navigation. Second, we discuss requirements for the visualization of individual navigation graphs and then present the approach taken with the tool STRATDYN. Third, we show that individualdifferences in the ability to selectively focus attention when navigating the Web can be analyzed with the help of the qualitative and quantitativedata generated by STRATDYN. Finally, implications for further research in this area and the continuing development of the approach presented are discussed

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Abstract: Two fields of research are heavily interested in developing visualizations for helping users coping with complex tasks and ill-structured subject matter resources: knowledge visualization and information visualization. The goal of knowledge visualization is to assist students in learning and problem solving by providing tools for fostering externalized cognition. The goal of information visualization is to provide knowledge-based access to information resources and help users in making sense of the resources they are looking for in information retrieval. The contribution draws attention to digital concept maps as cognitive tools which may provide a basis for the development of synergistic approaches that may help visualizing, accessing, and managing both knowledge and information and foster resourcebased learning.

The field of information visualization tries to find graphical representations of data to explore regions of interest in potentially large data sets. Additionally, the use of algorithms to obtain exact solutions, which cannot be provided by basic visualization techniques, is a common approach in data analysis. This work focuses on optimization, distance computation and data estimation algorithms in the context of information visualization. Furthermore, information visualization is closely connected to interaction. To involve human abilities in the computation process, the goal is to embed these algorithms into an interactive environment. In an analysis dialog, the user observes the current solution, interprets the results and then formulates a strategy of how to proceed. This forms a tight loop of interaction, which uses human evaluation to improve the quality of the results. Optimization is a crucial approach in decision making. This work presents an interactive optimization approach, exemplified by parallel coordinates, which are

We present an ACT-R (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) computational model of how people navigate in a degree-of-interest (DOI) tree. The model incorporates a visual salience function that determines which part of the display to attend to next. The salience function uses visual features of the display (e.g., distances) and semantic features of labels (e.g., information scent). The model was compared against data from participants and provided medium to strong fits to latencies and the number of nodes visited by the participants. The model shows that it is useful to distinguish between category-based versus similarity-based information scent. It also suggests that visual distance and scent may interact with one another, with scent playing a greater role at distances close to the current node in the visual focus. Keywords: Degree-of-interest trees, information scent, information visualization, computational modeling, ACT-R.

To satisfy potential customers of a Web site and to lead them to the goods offered by the site, one should support them in the course of navigation they have embarked on. This paper presents the tool STRATDYN, developed as an add-on module to the Web Usage Miner WUM. WUM not only discovers frequent sequences, but it also allows the inspection of the different paths through the site. STRATDYN extends these capabilities: It tests differences between navigation patterns, described by a number of measures of success and strategy, for statistical significance. This can help to single out the relevant differences between users' behaviors, and it can determine whether a change in the site's design has had the desired effect. STRATDYN also exploits the site's semantics in the classification of navigation behavior and in the visualization of results, displaying navigation patterns as alternative paths through a strategy space. This helps to understand the Web logs, and to communicate analysis results to non-experts. Two case studies investigate search in an online catalog and interaction with an electronic shopping agent in an online store. They show how the results of analysis can lead to proposals for improving a Web site. These highlight the importance of investigating measures not only of eventual success, but also of process, to help users navigate towards the site's offers.