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Virtual and Collaborative Environments

 

 

Futures Laboratory

Mission Statement

To perform basic and applied research in advanced communications, collaboration and visualization technologies (e.g. Tele-Immersion) to enable the development of wide area collaborative computational science. Our focus is on the development and evaluation of high-end technologies and systems that extend and compliment commercially available tools and resources.

We believe that tele-immersion provides the ideal framework for exploring new ideas in collaborative virtual reality environments, advanced scientific visualization and advanced interfaces to high-performance computing systems. Tele-Immersion also provides an ideal focus for studying advanced networking concepts and related human performance issues.

Visualizations

 The FL is developing three general areas of large-scale VR applications: visualization for atomic and molecular simulations, multiresolution fluid dynamics, and visualization of databases. Each area represents a thrust area in Argonne’s computational science strategy and presents unique challenges for virtual reality systems. These three areas represent archtypical computational science areas that will have broad application in the future and have been selected to balance our efforts.

 
Collaborations Coming soon...

 
Virtual Reality Technology We are developing new base level capabilities for high-end virtual reality systems.  These new capabilities include support for multiple channels of audio and video inside the virtual world (e.g. CaveCam and CaveTV), capture and processing of gaze information for eventual use for gaze directed rendering (and for studying human performance issues), two human performance test scenarios for quantitatively assessing the impact on immersive displays and tele-immersion performance, tools for using VR for constructing VR worlds, and interfaces for integrating desktops with high-end VR applications.

 
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