APPLICATIONS: Education Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education

The Universe: Distributed Virtual Collaboration & Visualization

Virtual Director and related technologies enable multiple users to remotely collaborate in a shared, astrophysical virtual world. Users are able to collaborate via video, audio and 3D avatar representations, and through discrete interactions with the data. Multiple channels of dynamically scalable video allow the clients to trade off between video processing and scene rendering as appropriate. At iGrid, astrophysical scenes are rendered using several techniques, including an experimental renderer that creates time-series volume animation using pre-sorted points and billboard splats, allowing visualizations of very-large datasets in real-time. Contact Donna Cox National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA cox@ncsa.uiuc.edu Collaborators Donna Cox, Robert Patterson, Matt Hall, Stuart Levy, John Martirano, NCSA, UIUC, USA Mike Norman, Pete James, University of California, San Diego, USA Marcus Thiébaux, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, USA Arttu Rajantie, Paul Shellard, Stuart Rankin, Stephen Hawking Laboratory, Cambridge University, UK virdir.ncsa.uiuc.edu/virdir/virdir.html