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Special Section >> Inside Purdue's Envision Center

5/26/2005

www.fakespace.com), featuring three 8 x 10 foot panels for rear projection of large-scale 3D images. These movable screens can be easily and rapidly rearranged to form a semi-enclosed “room” with three walls plus a fourth panel as the floor—an arrangement that creates a 3D immersive virtual environment. The VR Theater is also equipped with a state-of-the-art tracking system that allows corrective perspective rendering and direct interaction with the virtual environment. A fivechannel speaker system in the corners of the facility adds surround-sound cues to the virtual reality environment. Depending on the task at hand, the VR Theater is driven either using a 32-processor SGI Oynx2 computer, or an 8-processor SGI Oynx4. A high-end Windows and Linux PC cluster has been added to the already powerful VR Theater.

Motion Capture. In the virtual reality world, the process of recording a person’s movements or other live motion event, and converting those movements into a digital, 3D representation of the motion is called motion capture. The Envision Center houses a portable STT Motion Captor optical motion capture system composed of six infrared cameras on tripods, and as many as three linked computers. The system is operated in collaboration with the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, and is capable of capturing the movements of two people simultaneously. During the last academic year, for instance, graduate and undergraduate student groups from the Computer Graphics Technology program at Purdue used this system to produce an interactive dance performance in association with the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. A solo dancer wore the motion capture suit on stage, during the performance (see above). Data gathered from the suit was then used to create imagery which was projected onto two large screens on the stage.

Tiled Wall. The tiled display wall at the Envision Center is a 7 x 12 foot high-resolution display made up of a grid of 12 smaller projection displays controlled by many computers working together. The wall is capable of displaying 4,096 pixels horizontally and 2,304 pixels vertically, for a total of 9.4 million pixels—about five times the resolution found on a typical desktop workstation. The display system is extremely versatile, and can be used for2D, 3D, or stereo production of single, large-scale continuous images (see the image below). This capability is particularly useful when working with satellite imagery of geographical areas, and thus, not surprisingly, has immediate implications for homeland security and environmental protection initiatives. Yet, the tiled wall can also be used to display different graphics on each individual screen, or a combination of screens in the grid can be utilized for a variety of media displays. Image generation for the tiled wall is driven by a cluster of 12 high-performance PCs with high-end graphics cards.

Access Grid. The Envision Center places a premium on collaborating with researchers and student groups throughout the world, and the Access Grid (AG) at the center helps to make that possible. The Access Grid is an ensemble of resources that includes multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to grid middleware and visualization environments. (For more on AGs, go to



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