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About this site:
CyberOutreach and High-end
Visualization
The CyberOutreach
and High-end visualization group is dedicated to communicating
scientific knowledge and data-driven scientific visualizations to large,
non-expert audiences for outreach and education. The work involves developing and
using advanced computer graphics techniques to aesthetically design
data-driven scientific visualization.
In the process of “making a production” for digital planetaria, IMAX movies, or public outreach television,
the team develops expert-user visualization tools. This site is a composite of
visualization tool and project descriptions. We have both new and old projects
described here to provide historical context for the current projects.
The Virtual Director™ is
a virtual reality interface that enables gestural
motion capture and voice control of navigation, editing, and recording in
the CAVE, ImmersaDesk™, and Infinity
Wall™. Originally,
Virtual Director was created by Donna
Cox, Bob Patterson and Marcus Thiebaux. The software was further developed
by Cox, Patterson, and Stuart Levy.
The Virtual Director provides virtual choreography of multiple
applications including Cave5D
and Partiview/. Matthew
Hall developed Virtual Director into an Application Programming
Interface and Library:
VirDir2. This API
operates with a variety of screen display renderers
such as Partiview and VMaya (Virtual Maya). Alex
Betts developed VMaya enabling VirDir2
choreography capabilities within Maya animation scene files.
Virtual Director provides
remote virtual collaboration capabilities, linking together VR devices and
people represented as customized avatars. Virtual Director was supported by
NSF through a planning grant.
Major development was funded by “Cosmic
Voyage” IMAX movie through Motorola Foundation. It was patented November 28, 2000, No. 6,154,723: Virtual Reality 3D Interface
System for Data Creation, Viewing and Editing, D.J Cox, R Patterson, M.
Thiebaux,
Ref. T96137, December 5, 1997; initially disclosed
with the Research and Technology Management Office, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
VirDir2 provides current choreography and scientific visualization
on inexpensive passive stereo display technology.
The CyberOutreach
and High-end Visualization is an initiative at the National
Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA), University
of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, UIUC.
The following images and
captions provide early reference material.
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