The field's origins of this field are in the early days of [[computer graphics]] in the 1950s, when the first graphs and figures were generated by computers. A strongsignificant impulseboost was given to the field bywith the appearance, in 1987, of the [[National Science Foundation|NSF]] report "Visualization in Scientific Computing" edited by [[Bruce H. McCormick]], [[Thomas A. DeFanti]] and [[Maxine D. Brown]]. In this report the need for new computer-based visualization techniques was stressed. With the rapid increase of computing power, larger and more complex numerical models were developed, resulting in the generation of huge numerical data sets. Also, large data sets were generated by data acquisition devices such as medical scanners and microscopes, and data was collected in large databases containing text, numerical information and multimedia information. Advanced computer graphics techniques were needed to process and visualize these massive data sets.<ref name= "FHP02"> Frits H. Post, Gregory M. Nielson and Georges-Pierre Bonneau (2002). [http://visualisation.tudelft.nl/publications/post2003b.pdf ''Data Visualization: The State of the Art''].</ref>
The phrase "Visualization in Scientific Computing" which turned into [[Scientific Visualization]] was used initially to refer to visualization as a part of a process of scientific computing: the use of computer modelling and simulation in scientific and engineering practice. More recently, visualization is increasingly also concerned with data from other sources, including large and heterogeneous data collections found in [[business]] and [[finance]], [[administration]], [[digital media]], etc. A new research area called [[Information Visualization]] was launched in the early 1990s, to support analysis of abstract and heterogeneous data sets in many application areas. Therefore, the phrase "Data Visualization" is gaining acceptance to include both the scientific and information visualization fields.<ref name= "FHP02"/>
