The 2006 IEEE Visualization Design Contest is designed to foster comparison of novel and established techniques, provide benchmarks for the community, and to create an exciting venue for discussion at the conference.

The contest is open to everyone (excluding the contest organizers and judges). Individuals and teams from academia, industry, or elsewhere are encouraged to submit. Students and student teams are highly encouraged to participate. Faculty are encouraged to consider using this as a design project in visualization courses. Concurrent submission to the posters program is not allowed.

The goal of this year's contest is to design a visualization that is effective at answering domain-science questions on real data sets. The use of existing tools and research prototypes, and combinations of such tools are perfectly acceptable so long as they produce effective and useful visualizations. The theme for the IEEE Visualization 2006 Contest is See What's Shaking. The subject is the TeraShake 2.1 earthquake simulation data set. The questions come from the team of scientists who are analyzing the results.

Prizes: It is intended that the primary motivation for submitting be the honor of winning the award itself. To maintain the high standard due such an honor, the number of prizes awarded will be determined based on the number and quality of submissions. The first-place prize, if awarded, will include a single complimentary full-conference registration for IEEE Visualization 2006.

Each team can decide whether to submit anonymously or not. The names of anonymously-submitting teams will not be released to the judges (whether they can deduce this based on the submitted material is another matter). The names of the non-winning anonymous teams will not be released to the public, and the judges will be instructed not to release this information. The names of the winning teams and all non-anonymous submissions will be released to the public when the winners are announced; this is being done to provide the largest possible set of example visualizations for this data set. Even non-winning entries for this set of tasks may be optimal for some other set of tasks, and they are likely to have individual high points.

See the contest web page for more information.

Submissions must be postmarked by Friday August 11th, 2006.