SUMMARY OF HEPVIS WORKSHOP AND STATUS OF VISUALIZATION FOR HEP
L.A.T. BAUERDICK
DESY, Germany
Lothar Bauerdick from DESY presented a summary of HEPVis95, the Workshop
On HEP Event Displays, held in August 1995 at Fermilab. Hosted by the FNAL
Computing Division, the workshop offered a forum for presentation and
discussion of issues related to HEP Computer Graphics. Developers of a event
displays programs for most of the major HEP experiments met to discuss their
triumphs and tribulations and share their secrets and discuss the future of
event displays. After introductory presentations by Joel Butler of FNAL and James Bjorken of SLAC, part 1 of the workshop focussed on reviews of existing event displays. The speakers presented physics capabilities of various packages, technical details of underlying machinery as well as sociological and psychological aspects of development of tools for large scientific collaborations. The presenters were very frank about problems they had encountered and the discussions were very informative.
Some definite trends surfaced during the presentations. Not surprisingly, many developers are moving towards open standards. In particular, X, Motif, OpenGL, Tcl/Tk are becoming popular, as are some commercial components like IRIS Explorer and Open Inventor.
Part 2 consisted of three hours of hands-on demonstrations in a room equipped with workstations and X terminals. Preparation had been made so that most of the programs were on the local computers. The attendees demonstrated their programs to each other in a very interactive setting. An enormous amount of information was shared during this part of the program.
Part 3 was devoted to more abstract problems related to the data representations and psychological aspects of the computer graphics. Some uses for modern computing technology were discussed. Figure 1 shows an example of a novel representaion of a jet. Figure 2 is an example of two correlated views of the same event, demonstrating three dimensionsional capablities on a 2-D display.
The final part of the workshop focussed on the future - software methodology, languages and advances in the computer graphics industry. A complete set of presented transparencies can be accessed at http://fnpspa.fnal.gov/workshop/workshop.html
Figure 1: Superarrow used to show multiple jet properties
Figure 2: Simultaneous Views from the Aleph Event Display