The conference was organised by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and was specifically designed to address the growing importance of visualisation in the life-sciences. "The conference aimed to provide an arena for scientists and professionals in the biosciences and pharmacology to meet with the leading graphics and interaction experts and to develop new ideas and synergies. Besides some of the world's leading experts on graphics and human-computer interaction, many review talks on the use of visualisation techniques in the biosciences were given", Chris Jones explains. Chris Jones (CERN, Switzerland) is the co-organiser (together with Alan Robinson of EMBL-EBI) of FiV'97 and is currently on sabbatical at the EMBL-EBI. "The conference was attended by 250 people, with about a fifth of the participants originating from the graphics or other non life-sciences professions".

 The first day of the conference was intended to give scientists the lowdown on the state-of-the-art in graphics and human-computer interaction. Graphical widgets, virtual and 'augmented' reality, caves, real-time collaboration tools and several 'props' like force-feedback joysticks, 'power-gloves' and belt-computers were only some of the techniques and utilities shown.

Andries van Dam, of Brown University and director of the NSF Science and Technology Centre for Graphics and Visualisation, spoke about the move away from the traditional input devices that has dominated and limited interaction with applications for so long. To exemplify this, he showed 3D interaction widgets and applications for scientific visualisation, controlled by mice or other interaction devices with three or more degrees of freedom. A particular striking example was the NanoManipulator, a combined display table and 'force-feedback' pen that allowed a researcher to examine an object. In this case, several microscopic slides through a cellbody were used to provide a 3D structure, and the researcher could use the pen to 'feel' (called haptics) the texture of the object.
José Luis Encarnação, of the Technical University and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, demonstrated in his talk how scientists will be faced by a shift from 'Presentation and Interaction' to 'Navigation and Experimentation'. Supported by new presentation technologies, data types, interaction approaches, tele-technologies and tele-applications this trend will enable visual information in computer generated environments, opening new opportunities for applications in experimental sciences and for applications which have to be executed independent of time and location. One of the example applications was TeleInVivo, a 3-dimensional ultrasound visualisation tool for medical applications. This first-of-its-kind software features fast volumetric visualisation algorithms and efficient network collaboration tools for remote consultation. This application was used by the NATO in Bosnia with great success.

Following this were several live demonstrations by Detlef Krömker (Fraunhofer Institute of Computer Graphics) of the techniques and applications that were discussed in the first two presentations. For those in the audience who had never experienced true 3D before the demonstration of a projected virtual environment for interactive molecular modelling was certainly the main attraction. Using a head mounted display (or 3D glasses for those in the audience) and data gloves a scientist manipulated the positions of an AIDS antiviral drug and reverse transcriptase enzyme with respect to each other while a background molecular dynamics simulation gave feedback on feasibility of the interaction.
Jean-Francis Balaguer of Artemedia Online presented features and advantages of VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) and Java3D for use on the Internet. It was commented from the audience, however, that there is a remarkable reluctance from big players like Microsoft and SGI to commit to Java3D, especially because there seems to be little content (applications) right now. One of the things that the bioinformatics can contribute is to help blow life into Java3D by supplying interesting applications.

 The second day of the conference focused on the application of visualisation in the biosciences and featured review talks on current work.
Opening this day was Christian Henn, manager of the European Visionarium of Silicon Graphics, with a presentation on smart Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE's). These MUVE's can typically be used as real-time collaborative environments to visualise complex technical and scientific information and to actually work together on a problem. Henn demonstrated this concept by working together with a colleague (at another site) on a 3D rendering of a protein. The synchronised views of the browsers at either side showed how well this technology already works. "Everything that links to data abstraction or abstract visualisation of information is applicable immediately to all sorts of bioinformatics research. In addition to that, bioinformatics information is always going to be linked to 3D structural information anyhow, and that is the ultimate goal [in visualisation]. The more structural information we have and the more we understand the relationship between structure - function - sequence, the more we will see that all these things merge together", Henn added after his presentation.
A similar approach based on work of Phil Bourne (San Diego Supercomputer Centre) and associates, focusing on macromolecular structures, described a Molecular Scene Description Language (MSDL) which can be used to store scenes and additional information in a relation database, ready to be queried and rendered in a VRML browser to enable collaboration between scientists over the Internet.
Howard Bilofsky, head of Advanced Information Technology of SmithKline Beecham, stressed how nowadays scientists are confronted with the strange paradox of having an information overload (in proprietary pharmaceutical databases and remote sources like the Internet) and starvation (not able to quickly - if at all - find the required information) at the same time. Intelligent integration of information based on mediator architecture combined with novel visualisation techniques will help bring that 'golden nugget' of needed information to the surface.
EBI's Alan Robinson showcased work on visualisation widgets, and described how these widgets easily combine to make powerful analysis tools for the bioinformaticians. John Boyle of the Robert Gordon University (UK) did the same for the Java visualisation beans developed in the area of cancer chemotherapy. The last two speakers were John McLachlan (University of St. Andrews, UK) who presented his excellent work on virtual reality 3D modelling of embryo structures, and Gareth King of Zeneca Pharmaceuticals who addressed issues in analysing huge amounts of micro-arrays and large-scale cDNA sequencing data on gene expression. Visualisation and datamining tools like SGI's MineSet and the in-house developed GeneVis were successfully used to tackle this information.

 At the end of the conference a lively panel-discussion was held. One of the concerns of some participants was whether the high-end visualisation techniques are really going to help bioinformatics in the short-term.
Encarnação and van Dam commented that of course these visualisation techniques are now focused on other fields in science or engineering, but that co-operation with the bioinformatics scientists are required to help develop the tools that can make the difference 'between winner and loser in the pharmaceutical arena'. They strongly stressed the need for interdisciplinary teams to organise workflows (within bioinformatics or pharmaceutics) and making prototypes. Also, they mentioned several times the need to influence the software vendors and not to be content with waiting and hoping that what you end up with is what you wanted.
Paolo Zanella, head of EMBL-EBI, added that the swing to making visualisation a priority will come when companies or individual scientists openly contribute their success to the use of visualisation tools.

After the conference, Howard Bilofsky commented further on the concerns raised during the panel. "I think we just scratched the surface of how to apply some of these very sophisticated computer science and visualisation techniques in the area of bioinformatics - and bioinformatics itself being such a new discipline - that I expect to see enormous synergy between the two. The problems we have in bioinformatics will in fact encourage the computer technologists to change and improve the tools they provide".
Christian Henn added, "Events like this are really good steps in making that [ed: bringing the visualisation and bioinformatics camp together] happen, and in fact I think there are already some initiatives being started -- Quadstone's and EBI's joint BioVis project, which is an European one, is going in that direction".
There was a strong sentiment amongst the other participants too that this conference should be repeated, and more so that supplementary conferences and workshops focusing on more detailed problems and solutions would be needed to bring bioinformatics quickly up to speed with the newest visualisation techniques.