So far, more activities have been concerned with the area of scientific visualization, but developers of commercial packages for business graphics begin to include automated design aids into their products as well.
Current research issues concern mainly the automatic synthesis of coordinated animations and the further improvement of effective abstraction techniques.
(New Oct. 96) Automatic layout is regarded as a very promising subarea of knowledge-based graphics generation since it may offer a high market potential. European research groups are very active in conducting basic research in this area, mainly focussing on the integration of constraint programming and artificial intelligence methods in the layout process. From these constraint-based approaches powerful techniques have resulted as first commercial applications demonstrate.
(New June 97) Realistic, autonomous 3-dimensional virtual humans receive ever growing interest both in research as well as for commercial applications. A main goal of current investigations is to build intelligent autonomous virtual humans or actors. Such virtual humans are able to plan and execute tasks based on a model of the current state of the virtual world and they do not require the continual intervention of a user. This kind of highly realistic virtual human representations will equip games designers, multimedia designers as well as film producers with the required technology for creating simulations of realistic interacting humans. The availability of advanced artificial humans will lead to new sophisticated multimedia applications especially in engineering, education, and entertainment.
Among the international leaders, there are also European research groups with a long-term experience in simulating virtual humans. Given the huge market potential (e.g. synthetic actors for interactive television) it will be decisive to exploit the existing know-how for the development of commercial products and services.
(New July 98) The 1998 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces AVI-98 reveals interesting new trends in knowledge-based graphics generation and intelligent user interfaces. The conference program reflects a particular interest in Augmented Reality which enables novel applications with user interfaces that provide a linking of the real environment with virtual worlds. The demo presentations given by European researchers showed a broad variety of research protoypes operating in various application domains. A specific focus of the numerous contributions from Europe lay on the visualization of information spaces as well as interacting through different modalities. Furthermore, it turns out that aspects of usability constitute a salient issue in the area of advanced visual user interfaces.
(New Aug. 98) An interesting trend regarding knowledge-based graphics generation research in Europe is a specific focus on the field of simulation and visualization, as the graphical representation of modeled or real systems. In simulation and visualization novel multimedia and virtual reality techniques are becoming more and more applied for the presentation of models, simulation results and the monitoring of real systems. Taking advantage of artificial intelligence approaches new application concepts, tools and uses of simulation and visualization techniques are being investigated. One specific example of a topic receiving particular attention is the problem of graphical abstraction in the representation of processes and results.