2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtual and Immersive Learning

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2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtual and Immersive Learning

7/23/2006

How They Did It

With a grant from NSF to partially fund the center, the first step was benchmarking the best visualization facilities at other campuses, taking into consideration budget constraints and facility size. The technology assessment for the project was led by Gary Bertoline, the director of the center, and Dwight McKay, the technical architect. Intel and IBM donated workstations and high-resolution monitors, and the visualization vendors Fakespace, Hewlett-Packard, and Barco provided valuable information and recommendations.

The center now incorporates a wide range of technologies:

VR Theater. VR Theaters immerse users in the environment they are viewing. The users are not 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 featuring three 10’ x 8’ panels for rear projection of large-scale 3D images.
Motion Capture. The Envision Center houses an STT Motion Captor optical motion capture system that is operated in collaboration with the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. This system is composed of six infrared cameras on tripods and as many as three linked computers.
Tiled Wall. The tiled display wall at the Envision Center is a 12’ x 7’ high-resolution display made up of a grid of 12 smaller projection displays controlled by several computers working together. A 13-node PC cluster with Nvidia GeForce FX 3000G graphics cards provide the computation and rendering for the tiles.
Access Grid. The Envision Center places a premium on collaborating with researchers and student groups at various locations around the world. Users of the Envision Center at Purdue can work through the Access Grid on projects that incorporate both local and remote presentation and interactive environments.

Beyond the infrastructure elements listed above, the Envision Center also offers a variety of other assets, such as high-resolution, portable stereo displays that can be used in classrooms to enhance instruction through the use of stereo graphics, sensing and haptic devices (which allow a user to interact with a computer by receiving tactile feedback), nano-manipulation haptic devices, and other high-performance computing resources. In one room, you’ll find IBM T221 ultra high-resolution 22-inch flat-panel monitors capable of displaying 9.2 million pixels. And equipment from several major vendors like IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and SGI helped make up the fabric of computing resources at Purdue used in projects at the Envision Center.