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Special Section >> Inside Purdue's Envision Center
5/26/2005
” But the Envision Center is not designed for students alone: While students (undergraduates and graduates) are exposed to the latest technology in the field of data perceptual-ization computing through the center’s instruction, Purdue faculty members use the facility for displaying and interacting with scientific data in innovative ways. This dual focus of the Envision Center acts as a strong bridge between discovery and learning, as it encourages active student participation in research projects.Catalysis Project: Understanding at a Rapid Pace. One of those projects is the Catalysis Project, currently in progress at the center. Catalysis is a prime example of the link that the Envision Center is forging between discovery and learning. Importantly, it provides undergraduates and graduate students the opportunity to learn and explore, and at the same time, contribute to real-world research. Certainly, the development of new materials for new applications is one of the outstanding technical challenges in material science and chemical engineering. And in fact, recent advances in high throughput experimentation have accelerated the testing of new materials by an order of magnitude; the availability of powerful supercomputers, coupled with the evolution of the Teragrid, is enabling high throughput of a large number of molecular structures.
The key challenge addressed by the Catalysis project is to use new perceptualization tools to rapidly focus the vast amount of data that is generated, in a form that a materials expert can perceive, understand, and analyze at a fast pace. Funded by the Department of Energy and a 21st Century Grant from the state of Indiana, students from the Envision Center partner with students in the Chemical Engineering department to integrate their classroom projects into mainstream research projects. In pedagogical terms, by allowing students to actively engage with the concepts they are learning, the Catalysis project promotes situated learning. David Stein, in the online Situated Learning in Adult Education (ERIC Digest No. 195, 2000; http://www.cete.org/acve/docgen.asp?tbl=digests&ID=48), states that “in the situated learning approach, knowledge and skills are learned in the contexts that reflect how knowledge is obtained and applied in everyday situations…By embedding subject matter in the ongoing experience and by creating opportunities for learners to live subject matter in the context of real-world challenges, knowledge is acquired and learning transfers from the classroom to the realm of practice.”
The infrastructure available at the Envision Center plays a critical role in bridging that gap between discovery and learning. Some of the exciting technologies in use at the Center are:
VR Theater. Virtual Reality (VR) refers to “immersive, interactive, multisensory, viewer-centered, three-dimensional, computer-generated environments and the combination of technologies required to build these environments” (Carolina Cruz-Neira, Projection-Based Virtual Reality: The CAVE and Its Applications to Computational Science. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Illinois, 1995). VR theaters immerse users in the environment they are viewing. With such theaters, users aren’t just passive observers in the computer-generated world, but are interacting with the various components of the environment in real-time. Envision’s VR Theater is a Fakespace FLEX System (
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