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Visualization and Immersive Environments Testbed

In the Fall of 1998, the Visualization Group established the Visualization and Immersive Environments Testbed at the ITS. The testbed provides a generally accessible on-campus projection-based VR facility for faculty and student investigations into the application of virtual reality techniques within their respective disciplines. Application areas have included climatological data visualization; architectural design previsualization; molecular modeling; perceptual and posture studies in psychology/kinesiology; and independent studies into computer graphics programming and multi-modal interface techniques.

The centerpiece of the facility is an ImmersaDeskR2 system (developed in 1994 at Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) of the University of Illinois at Chicago). Our ImmersaDesk typically is paired with an SGI Onyx2/IR2 graphics workstation, and most of the development work involves C++/OpenGL/CAVElib programming, or adapting user data for us with existing CAVElib-based progams for data display and interaction. We have on occassion driven the ImmersaDesk with other graphics workstations using off-the-shelf applications and/or JAVA/JAVA3D codes developed in our group. These latter uses can be thought of as contributing development for the VR-Desktop Initiative.

Projects in the testbed:

Studying the Relationship Between Vision and Posture Stability

Students Craft Architecture in Cyberspace

Penn State Intercom (11/18/1999) reported on student work in the testbed.

Please send questions or suggestions about this web page to vizgroup@psu.edu

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