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One of the few areas left where immersive environments like the CAVE still are useful, other than as a tour stop, is in the field of Architectural Visualization.  Today at 4pm, Texas A&M’s Langford Architecture Center will be holding a grant opening of their newest immersive environment: An impressive 12-screen curved wall with support for most mainstream BIM tools like RevIt.

The new 12-display array, realized by a $50,000 gift from the Department of Construction Science Industry Advisory Council, is the second version of the immersive visualization system. The first iteration, a three-screen setup, was created with discretionary funds from the College of Architecture.

Kang said the new facility has already captured the attention of two construction companies engaged in campus building projects that wish to use the BIM CAVE for coordination meetings with subcontractors.

via archone..

Hardware cave, immersive, revit, texasa&m

At the InfoComm event right now in Orlando, FL, Mechdyne is on-hand showing their big CAVE and Display technologies on the floor in DPI’s booth.  They’ll be showing 3D datasets, CABELib and VRScape apps, and (a surprise to me) in Unity.

At the show, Mechdyne will demonstrate a new interactive 3D application that helps users easily create virtual worlds with outstanding realism. With this new virtual reality toolkit it is easy to build dynamic 3D environments that can now include scripted behaviors, triggered physics and user interactions. Such 3D content could be used for training, presentations, simulations, research or design reviews.

Now, using Unity to develop 3D applications for the CAVE is a thought that honestly never occurred to me.  If it’s true, it could be a great alternative to traditional CAVE systems like CAVELib and VRJuggler.

via HPCwire: Mechdyne Showing 3D Visualization Applications for at InfoComm 2011.

Hardware cave, conference, dpi, mechdyne, unity

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Virtual Reality is fairly commonplace in the automotive industry, but Citroen wanted to revamp their existing facilities with something more modern and powerful.  Nvidia and Scalable Graphics managed to merge up some Holobench displays, Quadro workstations, and some graphics magic to create a new cutting-edge solution detailed on NVidia’s blog.

A cluster of 20 workstations using NVIDIA Quadro FX5800 GPUs drives the PSA VR system. Previously, compute resources would be assigned to one of the three projection systems. But with resource pooling, those workstations can be switched to feed another display, increasing performance and improving the immersive experience. For instance, if the Holobench projection system isn’t in use, its workstations can be assigned to the Cave, rather than sitting idle.

via NVIDIA Quadro Powers VR for PSA Peugeot Citroën « NVIDIA.

Hardware automotive, cave, nvidia, virtual reality

If you enjoy playing Fruit Ninja on your iPhone or iPad, then you should check out what some enterprising germans have built inside a 4-walled cave at FH-Wedel.

VR-Project at FH-Wedel Germany in a 4 sided CAVE

Virtual Reality based on 3D cognition, placed sounds over a 5.1 sound system, buttkickers in the floor and haptic feedback through a Wii-Mote.

Tracking over a infrared cameratracking system.

Physics Library: bulletphysics.org

via YouTube – Fruit Ninja in the CAVE.

Science cave, virtual reality

CAVE technology, putting 3 to 6 large displays together with some high-end graphics and head-tracked technology, has been around for over a decade but has traditionally been in the realm where only universities and government labs could afford it.  Now, the technology is becoming more mainstream and the price is coming down, and it’s becoming a popular tool amongst Architectural Designers who can now virtually walk through their buildings prior to construction.

Fuller’s AEC clients are primarily in commercial construction, and they work primarily with 3D data from SketchUp, Revit, and Rhino software. However, virtually any 3D data can be converted for simulator viewing. “We haven’t been stumped yet,” Fuller said, referring to his company’s data-conversion track record. The exception is point cloud data, he said. “It must first be converted to polygons.”

via Full-Scale Visualization: More Is More | Cadalyst.

Hardware cave

CBSHealthWatch goes inside Weill Cornell Medical College’s new CAVE to see how it works and what it can do for the future of medicine.

Chris Wragge visits New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College to have a look at a new 3D technology that allows doctors to see inside the human body like never before. It’s called CAVE and stands for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment.

They do actually answer a few of the things I mentioned in my original cover, getting real doctors to show uses of the technology and talk about how it can impact their effectiveness.

via CAVE: A 3D Virtual View Inside the Body – CBS News Video.

Science biomed, cave

The “Daily Illini”, the independent student paper of the University of Illinois, has an article about their CAVE systems including some interesting research projects they’ve undertaken recently.

Kaczmarski said the CAVE was recently used for an experiment conducted by Art Kramer, professor of psychology at the University, to determine why people are distracted and inadvertently walk in front of buses.

“We found out when a person is engaged in a very personal cell phone conversion, the mental attention required takes away from visual attention needed,” he said.

One research project underway in the CAVE is another experiment focusing on distractions that children between the ages of 7-9 face when crossing the street

Also, the article makes comment to the “$1,000 pair of 3d glasses” that users must wear.  Usually these are CrystalEyes glasses, but I’m not aware of these costing $1000, usually far from it.  Perhaps they are including the price of attached trackers?

via CAVE home to cutting-edge experiments | The Daily Illini.

Graphics cave

Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City has just brought up a new CAVE Virtual Environment with the help of Christie, who is using eight Mirage 3-chip DLP projectors to generate acative stereo at 1920-square on each wall.  1920-square doesn’t sound like much, but its’ a huge step up from most CAVE’s that operate in the 1024-square range.

“The ICB’s CAVE facility is a powerful new tool that is helping us attract the best and brightest minds in the world,” remarked Dr. Harel Weinstein. “We are able to explore images at the molecular and cellular level with a clarity and precision that was previously unattainable. Images of tissues and biological objects can be twisted, turned and expanded, viewed layer by layer with the flick of the wrist, allowing for an unmatched level of inspection that engulfs researchers in colors and details.”

Of course, they can now view their medical data in higher and better resolution thanks to these new projectors from Christie.

However, if you run the numbers (based on my previous CAVE experience), at 1920 pixels on a 10-foot screen, that’s 16dpi.  That means each pixel is a 16th of an inch.  Given the blurriness of the active shutter glasses and the distance away that you stand (About 5 feet), that may not be noticable.  I find it interesting that they chose active stereo over a nonstereo 4K projector, which would double the DPI to about 30dpi.  While they don’t provide many details on what they’re doing, I would be interested to know why they chose Stereo over Higher Resolution.

Nonetheless, they do acknowledge the Pixel Density, albeit in a strange way.

Borcherding added, “Pixel density is key to visualizing the vast amount of data we need to analyze. We chose Christie because they were the only company to propose a genuine high definition CAVE solution, which no one else could offer.

Announcements like this I always treat with a bit of skepticism, since I find it hard to imagine what a 4 or 5 wall CAVE offers over a traditional flat display.  Their example doesn’t help the matter much:

The facility has also used the 3D CAVE to study MRI images to successfully identify areas of the brain that are underdeveloped in children whose mothers  engaged in substance abuse while pregnant. Dr. Luis Gracia, Scientific Application Specialist with the ICB, built a fully automated rendering pipeline using software from Harvard to help researchers visualize the brains of these children over time to track the development of various regions.  Being able to get children in therapies sooner based on these study results can correct a large amount of the deficit that they would normally experience if not treated as quickly.

Hopefully such user-studies of how the CAVE was instrumental in discovering these brain deformities will be published in upcoming scientific visualization journals, they make for great Success Stories and Application articles.  Sadly, too often are they forgotten in the ‘we got a new toy’ euphoria and obligatory tours.

via Christie’s 3D CAVE Helps Weill Cornell Medical College Deliver Breakthrough Findings.

Hardware, Science biomed, cave, virtual reality

Kitware has just announced that ParaView 3.8 is available to the masses, with an impressive collection of new features mostly garnered directly from their last VisWeek2009 Presentation.  In addition to officially bringing integration with the ‘Manta’ CPU ray-tracer (in source-form only, not in the compiled binaries), they’ve added interesting GPU-acceleration features like this:

A couple of GPU-based rendering/visualization techniques have been incorporated along with GPU-based volume rendering support for 3D image volumes, which is accessible through the “Volume Mapper” option on the Display tab. Support for Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is available as a plugin; this support can be used for visualizing vector fields over arbitrary surfaces.

In addition, this version introduces support for NetCDF with CF conventions, and a substantially revised Cosmo plugin that adds in data parallelism.  CAVE rendering has returned (if you didn’t know, it hasn’t been in any of the 3.0 releases), and the ‘Adaptive Processing’ version of ParaView (mentioned in the VisWeek talk) is now available (in source-format only) allowing a new way to work with datasets too large to fit in RAM.

There are many more new features, so go ahead and download it and check it out!

via Kitware – News.

Science cave, kitware, manta, paraview, software

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has both a 4-sided CAVE (3 walls & a floor), and a large 9-projector display wall, that they use for education and research.  In a fluffy writeup on the UAB website, they talk to Dr. Bharat Soni about the potentials for the technology.

“This facility creates a virtual environment and multi-dimension visualization capability resembling a real world,” explains Bharat Soni, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “At UAB, we’re using this technology mostly for engineering and health-care applications, but the possibilities really are virtually endless.”

They cover uses for visualizing airflow simulations, biomedical data sets, and connecting it to haptic devices for even better results.  I like this idea in particular:

Soni’s team is exploring collaborations with the School of Health Professions and Birmingham’s Lakeshore Foundation that will enable patients to perform rehabilitation activities in this controlled environment. “This is an exciting area in which to expand our 3-D capabilities because it has so many practical applications,” says School of Engineering Dean Linda C. Lucas, Ph.D. “In this virtual environments you can see the limitations and the areas that are showing progress, and all this is done with minimal risk to the patient.”

For example, amputees often are taught to water ski as part of their therapy in order to strengthen their muscles and improve balance. The cube can become a lake, and with the help of haptic and other devices the patients can experience virtual skiing.

See the article, and see the smiling Dr. Soni & Alan Shih, at the UAB site.

via Visualization cube offers infinite educational possibilities.

Hardware, Science biomed, cave, uab, visualization