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Good morning. My name is Linnea Cook from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. This session is a panel session on hardware and software solutions for scientific visualization that are being pursued at some of the large research laboratories in the United States. This panel originated because I saw and other people at Los Alamos saw that we were pursuing different avenues of -- and quite vehemently -- pursuing different avenues of meeting our graphics needs. In Livermore in particular there was real strife for several years over graphics terminals versus graphics workstations. I thought that other people may benefit from seeing why people are pursuing some of the solutions that they are.Today there are five of us who are going to discuss a little bit about what the environment is that we work in and what we're each doing to solve the graphic needs in our environments, and also why we think our solution is the best.Each panelist is going to and make an eight to 10 minute statement to that effect. I will give each panelist a complete introduction when they get up to speak.I suppose I should tell you a little bit about who I am before we get started. My background is in math and computer science. I have a BS/MS in that, and I am currently a group leader for one of the computer science groups that supports one of our large physics divisions at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Part of the work we do is to support our physicists with good computer graphics and I have been leading the graphics workstation effort for my group.Our first panelist to speak is Gordon Bancroft. He is from NASA Ames and he has a BS in aeronautics. He's been at NASA for six years, and is currently task manager of workstation applications, as part of the fluid dynamics division. He's involved in the creation of applications for visualization of fluid dynamic simulation. He has been involved in some of the procurement that NASA has been doing. Gordon.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We'll begin the panel session -- HDTV Computer Graphics. I am Koichi Omura at Osaka Municipal University. I am the chair of this panel. At first I'd like to thank SIGGRAPH, giving us the opportunity speaking today.The first presentation is by Mr. Ryou Mochizuki. He is the controller of NHK Engineering Service Corporation. He will discuss the compact disc application of HDTV, and after that he will present the brief introduction of HDTV.

This panel will discuss the issues and the problems associated with the simulation of natural phenomena. This is a difficult area of research since it generally involves complex data bases and in many instances time variant phenomena. The computational loads can become enormous as one considers the physics or the mathematical modeling of structures. Most items in nature, trees, clouds, fire and comets being some examples, have not been displayed realistically in computer graphics. This lack stems from a few different problems, all of which are significant. The first is the fact that realistic portrayals require large amounts of storage and consequently large compute time. Nature is able to create diverse detail at the most minute levels within an object of grandoise scale. The second problem is that of diversity of design within a given framework. For example, if a scene requires two dozen poplar trees, how does the designer construct trees that look different but are undeniably poplars? Humans typically become tired after the first few iterations of such a design process, with a resulting degradation in the subsequent models. Clearly, this problem applies to all of the phenomena mentioned above. Finally, there is a lack of models. First, second and third order representations are commonly used in computer graphics to model various kinds of surfaces and their boolean combinations. However, their applications to objects, which do not lend themselves well to being described as surfaces has not been addressed sufficiently. Previous attempts at realism have dealt with the appearances of the surfaces being modeled, in terms of their illumination or relief. More recently, fractal methods have introduced a new degree of realism into terrain modeling systems. However, it appears that natural phenomena will require more research into the fundamental way things occur in nature, and in terms of computer graphics, their representation will build on previous work, but will still require new modeling techniques.

SIGGRAPH has long provided a forum for the presentation, discussion, evaluation, and appreciation of beautiful algorithms and beautiful pictures. The Video Panel Session on Interactive Systems is a new SIGGRAPH event, affording us the opportunity to look at beautiful systems. The design of interactive systems and of their user interfaces is an art. We possess no systematic design methodology, no effective and universal method of evaluation. We speak in earnest praise of the importance of power, generality, flexibility, ease of use, ease of learning, robustness, and a dozen other universally admired attributes, but we do not know how to construct systems so that they are guaranteed to have these attributes.

Solid modelling systems in current use are based on approaches that are fundamentally different. The panelists will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches, especially from the user's point of view.

Accompanying the rapid development of integrated circuit fabrication technology has been a parallel, but slower, development of IC design techniques and systems. Recent approaches to IC design enable individual designers to consider developing their own VLSI circuits. Such capability may open the door to a more varied set of system designs than could previously be considered in most design environments. The panel members are all currently designing graphic systems oriented towards VLSI implementation. Each will give a short presentation describing one of their system designs. Following these presentations, three members of the previous session (Forest Baskett, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Fred Parke) will discuss common issues, problems, and future prospects.

Richard N. Spann Companies supplying graphics CAD/CAM components and systems form an important high technology business segment. Panelists representing four financial perspectives will discuss market entry, financing, segment performance and shareholder's expectations. Development of the graphics CAD/CAM industry in the 80's will be the unifying theme.

Two status reports will be presented. The first report describes the activities of Working Group 2 (Computer Graphics) of the International Standards Organization Subcommittee on Programming Languages (ISO TC97/SC5/WG2). Actions taken in recent WG2 meetings in October, 1979, and June, 1980, will be covered. Significant proposals being examined by WG2 include GKS, a German-designed 2D graphics package derived from the SIGGRAPH GSPC Core System proposals, and Videotex, a Canadian-designed protocol text communication that includes geometrically coded picture images. The second status report describes the recent activities of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Technical Committee X3H3, Computer Graphics. This includes the committee status, international activities, key technical issues, and future plans.