These proceedings contain the papers presented at VisSym '01, the third Joint Visuali- zation Symposium of the Eurographics Association and the Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics (TCVG) of the IEEE Computer Society. The symposium is being held from May 28 to May 30, 2001, in Ascona, Switzerland. The number of submitted papers has again increased to reach 68 this year and their high quality made it possible to extend the program to 33 presentations. VisSym has grown from a mostly European workshop to a visualization event of global signifi- cance, which is best illustrated by the 13 contributions from outside Europe. We observed that the spectrum of topics has been quite stable over the last few years, with volume visualization, surface extraction, information visualization and vis- ualization of vector fields and terrains as major areas of interest. A continuing trend ap- pearing in many of these areas is the shift to multi-resolution techniques. Looking at applications, biomedical visualization is this year predominant, but also noticeable are the three automotive applications which could indicate rapidly growing interest in vis- ualization in this area. We thank the Centro Stefano Franscini (CSF), Advanced Visual Systems Inc.