Pictorial Displays was the process industry's first "object-oriented" realtime graphic display system. Prior to this, graphic displays were created using character graphics with animation performed by "hard-coded" coordinates. Pictorial Displays introduced the concept of reusable vector drawn objects. Essentially, the difference between raster graphics and vector graphics. Using a proprietary graphics language, corporate engineers created a library of objects that would not only render themselves, but dynamically update based on live data from the plant. Using these library objects, plant engineers could create displays that rendered plant data in whatever format was meaningfull to the operators.

Behind the scenes, a runtime engine merged the object definitions with realtime data, creating a stream of graphics commands to be displayed by the rendering engine in operator and engineer consoles.