VizWorld.com

The University of Illinois at Chicago is moving the classic laboratory visualization system out of the back-rooms and into the mainstream with their new Cyber-commons high-tech classroom.

“In the past, these high-performance environments have been hidden away in research labs and used exclusively by researchers,” said EVL director Jason Leigh. “This cyber-commons opens up the technology to large student populations so that we can better understand the role of high-performance and ubiquitous computing in future classrooms.”

The new classroom has 19-million-pixels of contiguous workspace, and a massive centerpiece of a 20ft by 6ft tiled display wall.

The tiled displays, connected to data sources over high-speed networks, allow students to create electronic posters in real time by providing easy access to remote Gigabyte visualization data objects, just as the Web makes access to remote lower-resolution images today. Launching, juxtaposing, and resizing the content are done using a gyroscopic mouse, or remotely using a laptop.

The display wall is driven by a single computer, but will be replaced by a cluster in the fall for higher-end visualizations of supercomputer simulations.

via Laboratory Equipment – Cyber-Commons Opens at UIC. and UIC.

Science chicago, college, displaywall, education, evl, uic

The Intelligent Systems Lab at the University of Central Florida (ISL at UCF) and the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago (EVL at UIC) are working on Project Lifelike, a project to create realistic human simulations (avatars).  One thing they’ve found, which is related to an earlier discovery, is that the rendering & display is only part of the problem, the bulk of the “realism” comes from behaviors which they’ve implemented with an AI system.

The Project LifeLike team demonstrated the technology this past winter at NSF’s headquarters in Arlington, Va. The team gathered motion and visual information on a NSF staff member, and gave the avatar system information about an upcoming NSF proposal solicitation. Other people were able to sit and talk to the avatar, which could converse with the speaker and answer questions about the solicitation. Colleagues of the NSF staffer were instantly able to recognize who the avatar represented and commented that it captured some of the person’s mannerisms.

via Epoch Times – Engineering Your Double.

Science avatar, chicago, evl, research