First 500 words (draft)

Graphics Applications

Graphics applications have a wide variety of uses both for leisure and for industry. Whether it is for displaying information, designing,

Visualisation
Visualisation applications allow the user to view data in a way that is much easier to understand than text-based descriptions alone. Tables provide a more efficient way of relaying some information, such as experimental results, but they can still be difficult to read and glean useful information from. By creating visual representations of the data, the information it expresses can be seen in a form that conveys its usefulness quickly and in a form that is meaningful to the user. An example of this is the different between a table of percentages and a pie chart – the pie chart expresses its intent much more clearly because the reader can immediately see which sections are larger, and therefore the relative percentages.

Google Earth (http://earth.google.co.uk/) provides a good example of visualisation software by allowing the display of geographical data as 3D models. Geographical data is much easier to understand when conveyed pictorially because people try to envisage it as they would in real-life, even when it is presented as descriptive text. The 'All the Water' (http://david.tryse.net/googleearth/AllTheWater_360.jpg) visualisation is a good example of how graphics can convey information more easily by showing how large all the water on Earth would be if it were contained in a sphere. Presented as text this would be fairly meaningless to the average reader. There are lots of good examples of visualisation on the above website (http://david.tryse.net/googleearth/).

Visualisation is used a lot in commercial industry for conveying statistics and management data so that the reader doesn't need to understand how the data was arrived at, or the specifics of the original data. In this sense, the visualisation can be seen as an aggregation of the data, presented in a form that is easy for humans to understand.

Visualisation is also used extensively in the medial and scientific professions. The data needing to be conveyed by doctors and scientists tends to be complex and practically impossible to express using text or tables. Examples of this type of visualisation are brain scans, electron microscope images and ultrasound scans which are generated by a computer then transmitted to the user using visual data.






Computer Aided Design
Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications are graphics applications that assist the user to create objects by representing them as 2D or 3D models. These objects can be extremely complex such as cars, molecules or prosthetics. They can be used to design 'real' (ie physical) objects, such as aeroplanes and ships, or 'virtual' objects such as computer game scenes or the special effects in films. Computer Aided Design is useful for designers of physical objects because it allows them to make changes easily, experiment and make mistakes with minimal cost and no danger to others. The models can also be used to convey the design to others – be that the prospective buyer of a house, or a robot for manufacturing cars – because the model can be changed easily but also specified to exact measurements


Simulation and Animation



User Interfaces