Facilities
The CANVAS (Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio)
This electronic gallery at the Krannert Art Museum was a three-walled immersive space using circularly polarized passive stereo technology driven by a pc cluster. Connected to the Internet with gigabit networking, this space was used by artists to develop stand-alone or collaborative art projects in real-time and to display curated exhibits, the first of which, CalculArt, ended in 2006. The second exhibit titled Imag(in)ing Nature ended in 2009. The most recent exhibit titled Astronomic! ended on January 9, 2011.
The Traveling CANVAS
A portable version of the CANVAS, this system can be rapidly deployed in large gallery spaces, conferences and symposia.
Large vertical wall displays – ImmersaDesks™
The ISL houses five 4’x6’ vertical immersive displays. They support monocular and stereo vision, head, eye, and hand tracking, and incorporate surround sound speaker systems. Two of the displays are portable and are appropriate resources for demonstrating technologies at symposia and workshops.
Horizontal display – Horizontal ImmersaDesk™
The 4’x6’ horizontal immersive environment is appropriate for “sand table” style applications. Typically driven by a small pc cluster, monolithic deskside graphics supercomputers are also used in visualizations requiring large active memory accessed by several processors, such a the visible human dataset. This system is designed for convenient shipping and quick-reinstallation.
Computing Resources:
- 2 SGI multi-rack Onyx and Onyx2 systems, each with three Infinite Reality graphics pipes and 24 processors; primarily responsible for driving the 6-surfaced Cube and 4-sided CAVE™ rooms
- Two SGI deskside Onyx2 systems, 3 single-rack Onyx and one SGI deskside Onyx
- Several heterogeneous Linux/Windows clusters designed to support distributed graphics
- Over 30 terabytes of RAID-protected storage
- 10Gb network building backbone connected to 10Gb campus backbone with two dedicated 96 port 10/100/1000Mb Cisco switches, dedicated full subnet (130.126.127.xx) connecting all equipment and computer lab spaces and extending to all ISL office rooms. Additional gigabit LAN switches interconnect each of the several virtual environment systems, providing dedicated graphics-data communications channels through multiple network interface card-enabled computers.
- Numerous desktop workstations and personal computers: Sun, SGI, Windows and Macintosh systems that are configurable on a project-by-project basis distributed throughout three discrete computer labs.
Peripheral Devices
- Two ASR 501 integrated Eye/Head tracking systems
- Three SmartEye Pro Eye tracking systems
- 5DT Data Gloves
- Wireless headphone/microphone systems
- Two Kintrak forceplates
- 3D input devices including magnetic and optically tracked joysticks and wands
- Head mounted displays (HMD’s), both nVision see-through and Virtual Research eye and head tracked models
- EMG/EKG monitoring systems
Collaborative Resources
- H.323 videoconferencing up to 1.55mb
- H320 over ISDN from 64kb through 384kb
- Multi-site bridging/standards conversion capabilities
- Sun Enterprise-class file servers
- 802.11a,b,g,pre-n wireless networking
Support Services
The ISL has a full-time secretary, four full-time systems/application programmers, a full-time electronics technician and access to a 2000 square foot in-house mechanical/electrical shop facility. Housed in a 14,000 square foot facility, the ISL is able to add/modify simulator environments to suit the particular research needs of a project while maintaining extant facilities for ongoing research.
Collaborative agreements
We have developed operational arrangements in which we share system development and applications with J. Sullivan at the PORTAL at TU Berlin, with R. Brady and D. Zielinski at the DiVE at Duke University and with M. Zuffo at the CAVERNA at the University of São Paulo, all institutions with large-space immersive visualization facilities. An additional operational agreement has recently been concluded with Wolfram Research to collaborate on a Mathematica front-end for immersive spaces.