Large Displays, Labs, and Papers

Universities 



Virtual reality and immersive vidualization @RWTH Aachen University 



Some email insights re large immersive displays from Bill Sheman and Simon Su

Bill: It's a fair question!  I would say that Kenny's lab is probably the

first that comes to mind when thinking of successful large-facility

VR proving it's utility.  Another national lab that has done was is

INL.  (INL has a paper in our workshop -- we also invited Kenny's

group, but we didn't get a submission from them -- but Kenny has a

good contribution as a chapter in "VR Developer Gems" that conveys

the good work they're doing.


I think UC Davis has a good, and long, history of providing demonstrated

utility for immersive visualization.  Also, there are at least some

anecdotes of success from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

And so as not imply our own accomplishments (Simon an me), I'd been

impressed with NIST's contributions from before I joined.  Oh, and

I think the Disney DISH system demonstrated it's worth at Imagineering,

though I haven't spoken with Mark Mine in a while, so I'm not sure

how they are doing these days.


That said, that is a short list, and I suppose I could find more, but

it's certainly not pervasive.  I do know from chatting with people

who sell CAVE-style systems that there are still customers out there

who are finding value -- some because of the cost savings available

by pre-visualizing products, or in some cases the factory floor that

will make the products.  But, I've changed jobs once or twice because

someone's decided they don't want to fund a CAVE anymore.


AND


Simon: Let me add to Bill's email.....


Defining Immersive visualization as a display system with stereoscopic display and the user's view tracked using 6DOF tracking system.


At the DoD (at least at Army Research Lab), there are a number of immersive visualization (as defined above) setups. One of them is a multiple 10ftx10ft screens layout in a circle covering about 200 degrees of a circle of 10ft diameter, but no floor, that is being used for human factor research. Another is a 3 sided cave (front, left, right), no floor display but the floor is an omni directional treadmill that is being used for Soldier related research. The chair of https://2023.hci.international/vamr, Jessie Chen is a senior research scientist at ARL and she would know all of the research that is going on at Army Research Lab and Soldier Center. At Soldier Center (https://teamorlando.org/sttc/), for immersive display, they are largely a HMD type shop with no CAVE type display systems. All the research going on at the two places are feeding into the IVAS program (https://www.peosoldier.army.mil/Program-Offices/Project-Manager-Integrated-Visual-Augmentation-System/).


Alan Liu's (https://www.simcen.org/wave.html) is also pretty unique. He has 24 passive stereo screens using a mix of virtual and physical prop for users to experience realistic scenario. But the users' view are not tracked. Alan is also part of the DoD. His WAVE system is a front line medical training system.


TACC has no large scale stereo system with user's view tracked visualization system at the visualization lab on campus. The new visualization lab at the data center may have smaller stereo display systems with tracked view. I am not a 100% sure since it has been a while since I visited them. TACC is more a scalable visualization shop supporting high resolution visualization from data generated by the HPC.


I think CAVE2 at EVL at UIC is pretty good. They are active stereo and user's view is tracked. And Jason Leigh's vis lab at U of Hawaii's cyber-canoe, Jason's next generation of the CAVE2, is also pretty good (https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2014/08/18/cyber-canoe-to-explore-worlds-of-data-in-3-d/).


Large Display Rooms (like Brown's YURT)

Papers

Large Displays


Applications