BULETINUL INSTITUTULUI POLITEHNIC DIN IAŞI Publicat de Universitatea Tehnică „Gheorghe Asachi” din Iaşi Tomul LVI (LX), Fasc. 2, 2010 SecĠia AUTOMATICĂ şi CALCULATOARE CURRENT TRENDS IN COMPUTER GRAPHICS BY WERNER PURGATHOFER* and ROBERT F. TOBLER** Abstract. In this paper we give an overview of the current research trends and explore the challenges in several subfields of the scientific discipline of computer graphics: interactive and photorealistic rendering, scientific and information visualization, and visual analytics. Five challenges are extracted that play a role in each of these areas: scalability, semantics, fusion, interaction, acquisition. Of course, not all of these issues are disjunct to each other, however the chosen structure allows for a easy to follow overview of the concrete future challenges. Key words: computer graphics, rendering, visualization, challenges, computer vision. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 68-02, 68U05. 1. Introduction Computer graphics studies methods for producing digital images of data with the goal to communicate computer output to a human user in the form of pictures. The visual input channel has by far the broadest bandwidth of all our senses and therefore enables the most effective transport of information from computers to humans. Production includes synthesizing, manipulating and displaying the underlying data. The data may be almost any content one can think of: geometric or other spatial data just as well as statistical data, simulation results or abstract data, all real or virtual. Roughly speaking, the ultimate goal of rendering research is to create perfectly realistic looking real- time images of real-world objects, whereas visualization tries to create images of data and structures that are otherwise invisible to the human eye or completely abstract.