Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, APGV 2005, A Coruña, Spain, August 26-28, 2005

The history of the meeting on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualisation (APGV) goes back to a "campfire" meeting held in 2001 in Snowbird, Utah. This meeting contained graphics researchers, vision scientists, and others interested in how we perceive graphics and images in general. This kind of inter-disciplinary meeting can be exciting, since people realise that their skills and knowledge can be useful to others. Also, it's an opportunity to learn about leading-edge problems in related disciplines -- so, for example, graphics researchers need to find out how one can assess the quality of the images that they produce, and vision researchers become aware of the possibility of using graphics techniques to produce stimuli for experiments that are more realistic than the static images or video stimuli used previously.The desire to keep talking about these issues with a wider participation led to the first APGV meeting, held as a satellite meeting to the SIGGRAPH meeting in 2004. The meeting was an undeniable success, with 21 talks and 24 posters, and a tangible sense that new and important ground was being explored. It was decided to carry on with the event, but to attempt to get more of the perception community on board, to enhance the inter-disciplinary nature of the event. Also, it was felt that a change in location to Europe would make the meeting more accessible to a different audience compared to the first meeting in Los Angeles. The best way to do this was to run the 2005 meeting as a satellite to the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), which is the annual meeting on vision science outside the USA. The 2005 ECVP was due to be held in A Coruna, in northwest Spain. We were extremely grateful when the ECVP organizers agreed to allow APGV to follow their meeting in the same venue, which maximizes the opportunity for cross-fertilization.The continued interest in APGV is gratifying, and the new location (both in terms of geography, and academic context) promises an exciting mix of ideas, presentations, discussions, and opportunities for networking and relaxing in a beautiful, vibrant, location.We are pleased to present the Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualisation. We received 43 submissions for papers in response to the call for participation (compared to 38 in 2004). The range of topics continues to be wide, and this year there will be 21 talks and 26 posters.