Lance Long

CAVE2: a hybrid reality environment for immersive simulation and information analysis

Hybrid Reality Environments represent a new kind of visualization spaces that blur the line between virtual environments and high resolution tiled display walls. This paper outlines the design and implementation of the CAVE2TM Hybrid Reality Environment. CAVE2 is the world’s first near-seamless flat-panel-based, surround-screen immersive system. Unique to CAVE2 is that it will enable users to simultaneously view both 2D and 3D information, providing more flexibility for mixed media applications. CAVE2 is a cylindrical system of 24 feet in diameter and 8 feet tall, and consists of 72 near-seamless, off-axisoptimized passive stereo LCD panels, creating an approximately 320 degree panoramic environment for displaying information at 37 Megapixels (in stereoscopic 3D) or 74 Megapixels in 2D and at a horizontal visual acuity of 20/20. Custom LCD panels with shifted polarizers were built so the images in the top and bottom rows of LCDs are optimized for vertical off-center viewing- allowing viewers to come closer to the displays while minimizing ghosting. CAVE2 is designed to support multiple operating modes. In the Fully Immersive mode, the entire room can be dedicated to one virtual simulation. In 2D model, the room can operate like a traditional tiled display wall enabling users to work with large numbers of documents at the same time. In the Hybrid mode, a mixture of both 2D and 3D applications can be simultaneously supported. The ability to treat immersive work spaces in this Hybrid way has never been achieved before, and leverages the special abilities of CAVE2 to enable researchers to seamlessly interact with large collections of 2D and 3D data. To realize this hybrid ability, we merged the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) - a system for supporting 2D tiled displays, with Omegalib - a virtual reality middleware supporting OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph and Vtk applications.

The future of the CAVE

The CAVE, a walk-in virtual reality environment typically consisting of 4–6 3 m-by-3 m sides of a room made of rear-projected screens, was first conceived and built in 1991. In the nearly two decades since its conception, the supporting technology has improved so that current CAVEs are much brighter, at much higher resolution, and have dramatically improved graphics performance. However, rear-projection-based CAVEs typically must be housed in a 10 m-by-10 m-by-10 m room (allowing space behind the screen walls for the projectors), which limits their deployment to large spaces. The CAVE of the future will be made of tessellated panel displays, eliminating the projection distance, but the implementation of such displays is challenging. Early multi-tile, panel-based, virtual-reality displays have been designed, prototyped, and built for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. New means of image generation and control are considered key contributions to the future viability of the CAVE as a virtual-reality device.

The first functional demonstration of optical virtual concatenation as a technique for achieving terabit networking

The optical virtual concatenation (OVC) function of The Terabit LAN was demonstrated for the first time at the iGrid 2005 workshop in San Diego, California. The TERAbit-LAN establishes a lambda group path (LGP) for an application where the number of lambdas/L2 connections in a LGP can be specified by the application. Each LGP is logically treated as one end-to-end optical path, so during parallel transport, the LGP channels have no relative latency deviation. However, optical path diversity (e.g. restoration) can cause LGP relative latency deviations and negatively affect quality of service. OVC hardware developed by NTT compensates for relative latency deviations to achieve a virtual bulk transport for the Electronic Visualization Laboratorys (EVL) Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment application.

SAGE2: A collaboration portal for scalable resolution displays

Abstract In this paper, we present SAGE2, a software framework that enables local and remote collaboration on Scalable Resolution Display Environments (SRDE). An SRDE can be any configuration of displays, ranging from a single monitor to a wall of tiled flat-panel displays. SAGE2 creates a seamless ultra-high resolution desktop across the SRDE. Users can wirelessly connect to the SRDE with their own devices in order to interact with the system. Many users can simultaneously utilize a drag-and-drop interface to transfer local documents and show them on the SRDE, use a mouse pointer and keyboard to interact with existing content that is on the SRDE and share their screen so that it is viewable to all. SAGE2 can be used in many configurations and is able to support many communities working with various types of media and high-resolution content, from research meetings to creative session to education. SAGE2 is browser-based, utilizing a web server to host content, WebSockets for message passing and HTML with JavaScript for rendering and interaction. Recent web developments, with the emergence of HTML5, have allowed browsers to use advanced rendering techniques without requiring plug-ins (canvas drawing, WebGL 3D rendering, native video player, etc.). One major benefit of browser-based software is that there are no installation requirements for users and it is inherently cross-platform. A user simply needs a web browser on the device he/she wishes to use as an interaction tool for the SRDE. This lowers considerably the barrier of entry to engage in meaningful collaboration sessions.

Developing a Scalable SNMP Monitor

We present the design of a scalable visual toolfor the analysis of high-throughput network traffic, powerconsumption and cluster-based system resource allocation. The tool explores the possibility of visualizing remote anddistributed resources over large distances by using SAGE2, a collaborative framework for large scale display systems. Programmable networks and distributed cloud resources allowaccessibility to large amounts of infrastructure data. The toolneeds to present the information in an easy-to-understandformat for users who do not have any prior systems or networkadministration experience, but still have an interest in powerconsumption and network traffic -- such as university andcity officials. We evaluate the effectiveness of the applicationthrough user testing and feedback.