APPLICATIONS: Computer & Information Sciences Advanced Computation

Trans-Atlantic Real Time Simulation Steering and High Resolution Collaborative Visualization Over Optical Networks

We will demonstrate the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for scientific interactive and collaborative applications, and provide an environment for collaborative work in the context of computational steering. We are particularly interested in collaborations where different users look at different aspects of the same dataset, using different visualization paradigms. Researchers working on scientific simulation, visualization and analysis seldom use VR techniques in practice, because it often requires expert knowledge of complicated low-level graphics libraries. We are developing a high-level toolkit, VIRPI, aimed at non-VR experts, which implements collaborative and interactive paradigms for visualization, analysis of data and measuring with virtual instruments. The two major contributions of this collaboration are the presentation of a high-level interactive visualization toolkit aimed at non-VR experts, and the validation of the toolkit using real-world scientific case studies. The following applications are currently in progress: A dental application to measure the length of a molar root canal from CT scans Vrije Universiteit, Academic Center for Dentistry (ACTA) Visualization of the “Sisyphus Attractor: Laser-Diode Phase Space Exploration” Vrije Universiteit, Department of Theoretical Physics Simulation of molecular dynamics Vrije Universiteit, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Collaborators Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands; ElectronicVisualization Lab / University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Contact Henri Bal Vrije Universiteit bal@cs.vu.nl Jason Leigh Electronic Visualization Laboratory University of Illinois at Chicago spiff@evl.uic.edu http://www.cs.vu.nl/~renambot/vr/html/intro.htm