Meeting of the minds: visualization researchers and game developers are discovering a common ground in new graphics technologies.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to build a computer game, but rocket scientists, along with biologists, chemists, physicists, and every other professional who develops and applies visualization technology for scientific inquiry and discovery, have a lot to learn from computer game developers. They also have a lot to teach them.

Increasingly, the technology gap separating scientific visualization and gaming is being bridged by revolutionary advances in computer graphics hardware and software driven by the needs of both camps. Where scientists once ran their high-end simulations and visualizations on supercomputers and expensive graphics workstations, today ...