Dynamic projection environments for immersive visualization

Proceedings of the Fourth …, 2000

2006

We report on our iGrid2005 demonstration, called the “Dead Cat Demo”; an example of a highly interactive augmented reality application consisting of software services distributed over a wide-area, high-speed network. We describe our design decisions, analyse the implications of the design on application performance and show performance measurements.

2012 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, 2012

DisplayCluster is an interactive visualization environment for cluster-driven tiled displays. It provides a dynamic, desktop-like windowing system with built-in media viewing capability that supports ultra high-resolution imagery and video content and streaming that allows arbitrary applications from remote sources (such as laptops or remote visualization machines) to be shown. This support extends to highperformance parallel visualization applications, enabling interactive streaming and display for hundred-megapixel dynamic content. DisplayCluster also supports multiuser , multi-modal interaction via devices such as joysticks, smartphones, and the Microsoft Kinect. Further, our environment provides a Pythonbased scripting interface to automate any set of interactions. In this paper, we describe the features and architecture of Dis-playCluster, compare it to existing tiled display environments, and present examples of how it can combine the capabilities of large-scale remote visualization clusters and high-resolution tiled display systems. In particular, we demonstrate that Dis-playCluster can stream and display up to 36 megapixels in real time and as many as 144 megapixels interactively, which is 3× faster and 4× larger than other available display environments. Further, we achieve over a gigapixel per second of aggregate bandwidth streaming between a remote visualization cluster and our tiled display system.

2013

Immersion is an oft-quoted but ill-defined term used to describe a viewer or participant's sense of engagement with a visual display system or participatory media. Traditionally, advances in immersive quality came at the high price of ever-escalating hardware requirements and computational budgets. But what if one could increase a participant's sense of immersion, instead, by taking advantage of perceptual cues, neuroprocessing, and emotional engagement while adding only a small, yet distinctly targeted, set of advancements to the display hardware? This thesis describes three systems that introduce small amounts of computation to the visual display of information in order to increase the viewer's sense of immersion and participation. It also describes the types of content used to evaluate the systems, as well as the results and conclusions gained from small user studies.

Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '93, 1993

Several common systems satisfy some but not all of the VR definition above. Flight simulators provide vehicle tracking, not head tracking, and do not generally operate in binocular stereo. Omnimax theaters give a large angle of view [8], occasionally in stereo, but are not interactive. Head-tracked monitors [4][6] provide all but a large angle of view. Head-mounted displays (HMD) [13] and BOOMs [9] use motion of the actual display screens to achieve VR by our definition. Correct projection of the imagery on large screens can also create a VR experience, this being the subject of this paper. This paper describes the CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) virtual reality/scientific visualization system in detail and demonstrates that projection technology applied to virtual-reality goals achieves a system that matches the quality of workstation screens in terms of resolution, color, and flicker-free stereo. In addition, this format helps reduce the effect of common tracking and system latency errors. The off-axis perspective projection techniques we use are shown to be simple and straightforward. Our techniques for doing multi-screen stereo vision are enumerated, and design barriers, past and current, are described. Advantages and disadvantages of the projection paradigm are discussed, with an analysis of the effect of tracking noise and delay on the user. Successive refinement, a necessary tool for scientific visualization, is developed in the virtual reality context. The use of the CAVE as a one-to-many presentation device at SIGGRAPH '92 and Supercomputing '92 for computational science data is also mentioned.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2000

Fig. 1. This figure shows some of our applications in action. From left to right: Our collaborative map visualization application with two users visualizing different parts of the map at the same time on our 3 × 3 array of nine projectors; Our collaborative emergency management application with two users trying to draw a path to hazardous location and dispatching teams of first responders on our 3 × 3 array of nine projectors; Digital graffiti drawn using our collaborative graffiti application on only six of the projectors. We deliberately did not edge blend the projectors to show the six projectors clearly; Four children working together on our digital graffiti application on a 3 × 3 array of nine projectors.

1998

Large-scale immersive displays have an established history in planetaria and large-format film theaters. Video-based immersive theaters are now emerging, and promise to revolutionize group entertainment and education as the computational power and software applications become available to fully exploit these environments.

1993

Several common systems satisfy some but not all of the VR definition above. Flight simulators provide vehicle tracking, not head tracking, and do not generally operate in binocular stereo. Omnimax theaters give a large angle of view [8], occasionally in stereo, but are not interactive. Head-tracked monitors [4][6] provide all but a large angle of view. Head-mounted displays (HMD) [13] and BOOMs [9] use motion of the actual display screens to achieve VR by our definition. Correct projection of the imagery on large screens can also create a VR experience, this being the subject of this paper. This paper describes the CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) virtual reality/scientific visualization system in detail and demonstrates that projection technology applied to virtual-reality goals achieves a system that matches the quality of workstation screens in terms of resolution, color, and flicker-free stereo. In addition, this format helps reduce the effect of common tracking and system latency errors. The off-axis perspective projection techniques we use are shown to be simple and straightforward. Our techniques for doing multi-screen stereo vision are enumerated, and design barriers, past and current, are described. Advantages and disadvantages of the projection paradigm are discussed, with an analysis of the effect of tracking noise and delay on the user. Successive refinement, a necessary tool for scientific visualization, is developed in the virtual reality context. The use of the CAVE as a one-to-many presentation device at SIGGRAPH '92 and Supercomputing '92 for computational science data is also mentioned.

Large Scale Displays, besides their visualization capabilities, can provide a great sense of immersion to a geographically distributed group of people engaging in collaborative work. This paper presents a system that uses remotely located wall sized displays, to offer immersive, interactive collaborative visualization and review of 3D CAD models for engineering applications.

IEEE COMPUTER GAPHICS AND …, 2000

Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH international conference on Virtual Reality continuum and its applications in industry - VRCAI '04, 2004

This paper explores the possibilities of using portable devices in multiprojection environments, such as CAVEs, Panoramas and Power Walls. We propose and implement a tool to generate graphical interfaces in a straightforward manner. These interfaces are light and can be run on PDAs. The interface application communicates transparently with a graphic cluster, via any underlying network system, which processes the events and maintains the synchrony of the rendered images in real-time. This tool is part of Glass, a library for distributed computing. We present two examples of applications: Cathedral and Celestia.

1994

This paper reviews existing graphics architecture software techniques for the visualization of numerical data. A new "next" generation 3D Data Visualization system based around a "Steering" and Virtual Reality paradigm is proposed, which appears to be the most promising in search for a modern solution to the problem of interacting with large, multi-dimensional datasets.

IEEE Computer, 1999

In collaborative virtual reality (VR), the goal is to reproduce a face-to-face meeting in minute detail. Teleimmersion moves beyond this idea, integrating collaborative VR with audio- and video-conferencing that may involve data mining and heavy computation. In teleimmersion, collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases and gather results. They don't meet in a room to discuss a car engine; they meet in the engine itself. The University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) has hosted several applications that demonstrate rudimentary teleimmersion. All users are members of Cavern (CAVE Research Network) [<http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern>] $a collection of participating industrial and research institutions equipped with CAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environment), ImmersaDesk VR systems and high-performance computing resources, including high-speed networks. There are more than 100 CAVE and ImmersaDesk installations worldwide. The pressing challenge now is how to support collaborative work among Cavern users without having them worry about the details of sustaining a collaboration. Another problem is providing both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. The authors detail how they've built new display devices to serve as more convenient teleimmersion end-points and to support their international networking infrastructure with sufficient bandwidth to support the needs of teleimmersive applications

Electronic Imaging, 2019

One of the main shortcomings of most Virtual Reality display systems, be it head-mounted displays or projection based systems like CAVEs, is that they can only provide the correct perspective to a single user. This is a significant limitation that reduces the applicability of Virtual Reality approaches for most kinds of group collaborative work, which is becoming more and more important in many disciplines. Different approaches have been tried to present multiple images to different users at the same time, like optical barriers, optical filtering, optical routing, time multiplex, volumetric displays and lightfield displays among others. This paper describes, discusses and compares different approaches that have been developed and develop an evaluation approach to identify the most promising one for different usage scenarios.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2000