Summary form only given. As a person involved in computer graphics since 1969, I have participated in the evolution of the field in a scientific laboratory, an automotive company, and an aerospace company. This set of experiences has provided me a perspective quite different from that of the arts and entertainment industries that drive the majority of current graphics advances. I've been lucky to have had the opportunity to work at all levels of graphics and user interface development, from computer animation to bit-level device drivers to user interface management systems to developing an integrated, full-scale CAD/CAM system. In addition, I've worked across all aspects of product development in aerospace and automotive. This has given me broad insight into product development-based interactive graphics. While my experience is predominantly in product development and manufacturing, I see clear parallels between the value of graphics in aerospace and automotive and value in other industries (e.g., animation, art, games, medicine, oil and gas, mapping). To develop the concept of the third wave, I'll examine some of the significant advances industry has made to computer graphics and directions I see needed because of issues with the current state-of-the-art. I believe that computer graphics, including virtual reality, is at an innovation plateau and ready for the next wave of innovation.

Summary form only given. As a person involved in computer graphics since 1969, I have participated in the evolution of the field in a scientific laboratory, an automotive company, and an aerospace company. This set of experiences has provided me a perspective quite different from that of the arts and entertainment industries that drive the majority of current graphics advances. I've been lucky to have had the opportunity to work at all levels of graphics and user interface development, from computer animation to bit-level device drivers to user interface management systems to developing an integrated, full-scale CAD/CAM system. In addition, I've worked across all aspects of product development in aerospace and automotive. This has given me broad insight into product development-based interactive graphics. While my experience is predominantly in product development and manufacturing, I see clear parallels between the value of graphics in aerospace and automotive and value in other industries (e.g., animation, art, games, medicine, oil and gas, mapping). To develop the concept of the third wave, I'll examine some of the significant advances industry has made to computer graphics and directions I see needed because of issues with the current state-of-the-art. I believe that computer graphics, including virtual reality, is at an innovation plateau and ready for the next wave of innovation.

Interactive visualization of massive models still remains a challenging problem. This is mainly due to a combination of ever increasing model complexity with the current hardware design trend that leads to a widening gap between slow data access speed and fast data processing speed. We argue that developing efficient data access and data management techniques is key in solving the problem of interactive visualization of massive models. Particularly, we discuss visibility culling, simplification, cache-coherent layouts, and data compression techniques as efficient data management techniques that enable interactive visualization of massive models.

Complex distributed environments contain thousands of workstations that can run hundreds of applications.Multiple networks are used to connect the workstations to dozens of behind-the-scenes servers, all of which are necessary for the user to perform even simple tasks.Such distributed environments are difficult to design and maintain, and current software engineering practices are not well adapted to deal with this inherent complexity.This paper describes the Single Glass Project in the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group.Single Glass expands the number of both internally developed and commercial-offthe-shelf applications a single user can access from any workstation.The result is in production use by over 6,000 people in both Puget Sound and Wichita.The key to success is a flexible and scaleable architecture that works within a complex, heterogeneous application and delivery system environment.Our work has focused on both computing technology (software and delivery systems) and general processes (primary technology, support, and organization).Agreements on both technology and process improvements are essential to project success.Single Glass is a work in progress, and we describe areas that require additional investigation.Our experience indicates that most technical problems can be addressed.However, significant improvement is needed in software engineering processes and practices to design and build applications and systems that can be tested, delivered, supported, and diagnosed when made available alongside other, independently developed applications and systems.

Graphical user interfaces (GUI's) make applications easier to learn and use.At the same time, they make application design, construction, and especially test more difficult because user-directed dialogs increase the number of potential execution paths.This paper considers a subset of GUI-based application testing: how to exercise an application like a novice user.We discuss different solutions and a specific implementation that uses genetic algorithms to automatically generate user events in an unpredictable yet controlled manner to produce novice-like test scripts.

The construction of applications for sophisticated scientific and engineering disciplines is often time consuming and costly. However, applications ranging from finite element analysis to numerical control to robotics have similar requirements for programming tools that can greatly reduce the time to construct an application and improve its quality. This paper defines a set of Boeing-developed tools to help in the implementation of graphics based applications.

The design and construction of the user interface to interactive systems is receiving increased attention. This paper describes a user interface management system that allows a designer/developer to focus on the logical functionality of an application without the usual bookkeeping associated with a conventional programming language. The user interface management system contains two components: a special purpose, application independent dialogue specification language and a run-time interpreter that provides a number of interaction extensions not possible with procedure libraries.

The user of an interactive application is in an anamolous position, especially if he is not one of the elite class known as "computer bums". This mythical user is at the end of a process totally controlled by a computer and a program. His communications with the program may suffer greatly because of this total dependence.Control of communication in the batch environment is much more a one-way street. Here the user supplies the program data, and the batch program informs him if something has gone wrong by evicting his run from the machine. The user then consults available documentation (if it exists) or a computer expert (if one exists) for help in solving the problem. The communication between program and user is not critical in this environment; the user is expected to know what to do before he starts the run and can seek assistance outside of the computer.The interactive environment, however, has the user totally at the mercy of the program for diagnostic and prompting information. Even sophisticated graphics-oriented applications, which provide large amounts of useful information through pictures, may not adequately control the user's interaction. The user needs direction imposed on him to successfully solve his problem. At the same time, the system must provide flexibility, i.e., he must not be constrained to a single path of action that may only suit the code's implementor. No user's manual can capture a flow of this nature because of the inherently static nature of words on paper. Furthermore, paging back and forth in a manual to decipher what is to be done next destroys the spontaneity implicit in a successful interactive system.The user must be the main concern of the interactive system for it to be successful. With this goal in mind, Battelle-Columbus has developed a structured approach to controlling user interaction. The approach benefits the implementor as well as the user. It places emphasis on design and checkout of interaction as the first, rather than the last, step in an interactive application.