This book contains the proceedings of the sixth Eurographics Workshop on Vir tual Environments. The event took place from June 1 to June 2, 2000, in Am sterdam. We hope that readers will find these proceedings to be valuable, not only for virtual environment researchers, but also for practitioners developing or using virtual environment applications. We are glad to report that visibility of the workshop continues to expand and that virtual environment researchers and practitioners from allover the world are submitting papers. This year, 40 papers and case studies were submitted of which 20 were accepted. In addition, we are glad to see that the focus of the workshop is also expanding. We accepted 6 research papers on evaluation of virtual environments and there was a broad sampling of other topics. We would like to thank all those involved in organizing the symposium. In particular, thanks go to Mieke Brune who was in charge of the local organization. In addition, we want to thank the international program committee for their excellent, yet laborious, job in reviewing all submitted papers. The quality of the workshop is a reflection of the quality of the submitted papers and the quality of the reviewing process.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the use of human visual perception for data understanding is essential in many fields of science. This book contains the papers presented at VisSym 00, the Second Joint Visualization Symposium organized by the Eurographics and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics (TCVG). It reports on 27 new algorithms, techniques and applications in the area of data visualization. The topics are scientific data visualization and information visualization. It gives practitioners and visualization researchers an overview of the state of the art and of future directions of data visualization."