A point visibility graph is a graph induced by a set of points in the plane, where every vertex corresponds to a point, and two vertices are adjacent whenever the two corresponding points are visible from each other, that is, the open segment between them does not contain any other point of the set. We study the recognition problem for point visibility graphs: given a simple undirected graph, decide whether it is the visibility graph of some point set in the plane. We show that the problem is complete for the existential theory of the reals. Hence the problem is as hard as deciding the existence of a real solution to a system of polynomial inequalities. The proof involves simple substructures forcing collinearities in all realizations of some visibility graphs, which are applied to the algebraic universality constructions of Mn "ev and Richter-Gebert. This solves a longstanding open question and paves the way for the analysis of other classes of visibility graphs. Furthermore, as a corollary of one of our construction, we show that there exist point visibility graphs that do not admit any geometric realization with points having integer coordinates.
The visibility graph V(P) of a point set P R2 has vertex set P, such that two points v,w ∈ P are adjacent whenever there is no other point in P on the line segment between v and w. We study the chromatic number of V(P). We characterise the 2- and 3-chromatic visibility graphs. It is an open problem whether the chromatic number of a visibility graph is bounded by its clique number. Our main result is a super-polynomial lower bound on the chromatic number (in terms of the clique number). In this survey article, we present open problems and conjectures on visibility graphs of points, segments, and polygons along with necessary backgrounds for understanding them.