Lakshmi Sastry

Virtual environments for engineering applications

Virtual reality (VR), provides the user with an ego-centred human-computer interaction environment by presenting the data as a computer-generated 3D virtual environment. This enables the user to be immersed in this world via user position tracking devices and to interact with the data objects in the world in intuitive ways. This paper describes a selection of VR simulations for engineering applications implemented in CLRC which demonstrate the potential of VR interaction techniques to offer quicker and possibly better understanding of spatial relationships and temporal patterns inherent in large data sets. Two of the case studies have been implemented to support engineers communicate and review their designs with scientists, managers and manufacturers and to plan their assembly and maintenance work in hazardous physical environments. The other two applications are visualisation case studies based on data sets generated by computational engineering simulations. The case studies are ‘real world’ applications, involving end-users of large or complex data sets. Insight gained into the user interaction requirements through the implementation and user comments is guiding ongoing research and development activity and this is discussed briefly.

Integrative Biology - the challenges of developing a collaborative research environment for heart and cancer modelling

The Integrative Biology project is building a Grid infrastructure which will enable biomedical scientists to develop accurate multi-scale computational models of the heart and of cancer tumours. This infrastructure will remove many of the constraints limiting research progress today by providing access to leading-edge supercomputing and data management resources and by improving facilities to support collaboration between scientists distributed around the world. This paper describes how the project is addressing some specific technical challenges in developing such a collaborative research environment.

Design review and visualization steering using the INQUISITIVE interaction toolkit

This paper describes the architecture of an interaction toolkit for creating virtual environments. The toolkit contains interaction techniques, interaction objects such as menus, spanner and a runtime manager to interface to virtual reality development tools such as Maverik. The toolkits use with a number of real-world applications in science and engineering and with different virtual reality development tools is also described. Future plans to provide an interactive interface are described.