Playing Games for Visualization

As anyone who has been following my Twitter account knows, I am a gamer. I eagerly await the conclusion of BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy; Mass Effect 1 was the first game I owned on my XBox in 2008, so it has been a long time coming. More pertinent to this discussion, however, is my interest in how video games and visualization intersect. The interplay between visualization and games is the subject of joint work with Dr. Niklaus Elmqvist and his student Brian Bowman that will appear in a future issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.