From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Virtual Environment Lets Researchers Walk Through Data (C
Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 17:07:26 -0500
Wednesday, May 26, 1999
A Virtual Environment Will Let Brown U. Researchers Walk Through Their Data
By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
Providence, R.I.
"Cube," says Andrew Forsberg, and a simple cube appears, floating just
beyond the reach of two visitors he's brought into a small, bright,
line-drawing room at Brown University here. The room has a
three-dimensional, line-drawing table, line-drawing chairs, even
line-drawing pictures on the walls -- it's a little like standing inside a
1950's cartoon, except that three live humans are there.
"Sphere," says Mr. Forsberg, speaking into a microphone attached to his
shirt. The cube becomes a wire-mesh sphere. "Cone," he says. "Red." The
sphere becomes a cone and turns red.
Wearing stereo-vision glasses and special touch-sensitive gloves, one of Mr.
Forsberg's visitors reaches toward the table, which is set with line-drawing
plates and glasses. Mr. Forsberg, a user-interface developer in Brown's
computer-science department, explains how to pick up one of the virtual
objects: Point at what you want to grasp, then touch a finger to your thumb.
As the visitor lifts his hand, the glass rises off the table, rotates, moves
toward him -- and then remains floating above the table when he releases his
finger from his thumb. Next Mr. Forsberg tells one of the visitors how to
change the virtual world's scale: Point at the wall, grasp, and push down. A
moment later, three full-sized adults are towering awkwardly over a
dollhouse room.
Such a demonstration may bring to mind Alice's adventures, but the
8-by-8-foot room in which it takes place is actually a wonderland of an
altogether different sort -- a high-tech, multi-million-dollar research
facility in which state-of-the-art graphics technology runs off of a
brand-new IBM supercomputer capable of processing enormous amounts of data
quickly.
The virtual-reality room has three walls and a floor onto which
high-resolution images can be projected at up to 30 frames a second, fast
enough to seem plenty real. A simple but computing-intensive trick of
stereoscopy gives the images depth, so that you can seem to walk around an
object or peer far into the distance. The room's fourth side is open to a
larger room that accommodates observers and a bank of computers used to
control the virtual-reality cube.
The room and the IBM RS/6000 SP next door are the centerpieces of Brown's
new $8-million Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and
Visualization, which opens formally this afternoon. The center is intended,
in part, to let researchers from departments all across the campus visualize
and even hear their information by literally immersing themselves in it.
For instance, physicists will be able to stand in the middle of a
three-dimensional, audio-enhanced flow of information from a large data set
-- an abstract representation that can be changed on the fly to highlight
any passing phenomenon that seems interesting. Planetary geologists will be
able to wander through a realistic Martian landscape recreated from
satellite images.
The center will also give computer scientists here an opportunity to explore
new ways in which people and computers can interact. The planetary
geologist, for instance, might be able to change the way data are displayed
in the virtual room simply by giving a voice command, or by grasping a
virtual Martian peak and stretching it -- much easier than lugging a
keyboard and a mouse around the surface of Mars.
"We're trying to get as natural a dialogue going with the computer as we
can," says Andries van Dam, a professor of computer science who helped lead
the effort to get the new facility built. He also says the facility will
pair "the best of parallel computing and the best of pattern recognition,
which is what we have in our heads -- wetware."
Mr. van Dam points out that a large proportion of neurons in the human brain
are devoted to vision -- many more than to the other senses. Humans, he
says, also have "a tremendous capacity for detecting even small visual
patterns."
"That's what we're leveraging when a scientist tries to visualize data," he
says.
Brown's new center, the latest in a series of virtual environments on
university campuses and elsewhere, is the result of a close collaboration
between the university and IBM. It grew out of 1997 National Science
Foundation grant for major-instrument research.
It is not the most elaborate virtual-reality facility -- a few six-sided
rooms have been constructed elsewhere, although they're considerably more
expensive. Virtual-reality rooms are often known as "caves," although the
acronym CAVE -- for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment
(http://www.evl.uic.edu/EVL/) -- belongs to a specific technology created at
the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at
Chicago.
Although he is clearly a fan, Mr. van Dam says virtual-reality technology
has yet to prove itself invaluable, at least as far as scholarly research is
concerned. "There are dozens of caves out there, but no real hard scientific
evidence that they help you do your science better," he says. One project
Brown computer scientists have in the works, he says, will involve running
controlled studies to see whether the facilities really enhance scholarship.
Samuel Fulcomer, the Brown center's director, notes that the facility here
is unique in at least one way: It runs on IBM hardware, while other
virtual-reality facilities use computers from SGI, formerly Silicon
Graphics. For Brown researchers, this is something of a drawback -- they'll
have to create all their virtual-reality software from scratch, rather than
taking advantage of existing programs that run only on SGI machines.
The benefit, however, is that IBM is working closely with computer
scientists here to assure that they have the equipment they need. For
instance, the company is building a device that will allow each wall of the
cube to be powered by four computers, instead of one. With four machines
each processing a quarter of the image, the virtual environment will be
capable of handling more-detailed information -- with the detail represented
either by a greater resolution in the images or smaller amounts of time
between the events being displayed, or both.
Mr. Fulcomer says that the center will also serve Brown researchers who need
to take advantage of the new computer's capacity, but don't need to see
their data in three dimensions. The new machine is five to six times as
powerful as the next-most-powerful computer on the campus, he says -- and
something like 100 times as powerful as the average desktop P.C.
Such capacity is necessary, he says, because some researchers who use the
center work with data sets that would fill the hard drives of 50 desktop
machines -- and, he says, such a data set "could just be a short time
sequence," a small portion of a larger event that a researcher is studying.
To help manage such quantities of information, Mr. van Dam says, computer
scientists here will also be studying new programming techniques that would
let researchers alter computations once they're under way. "As a computer is
working, a scientist could say, 'Wait, give me more of this.' You could
steer the computation," he says.
The techniques would give researchers "a new way of doing horrendously large
computations," he adds. Computations that large are common in weather
research, drug design, physics, and other areas of research.
Mr. Fulcomer notes that more and more corporations are also using
virtual-reality facilities for product design and testing. And the
facilities would be "a natural" for architects, who could let clients see
three-dimensional representations of unbuilt buildings.
Don't expect to see your kitchen renovation in a virtual environment next
week, however -- the computing power behind immersive virtual reality is
still wildly expensive. Mr. Fulcomer says that, as configured, the IBM
RS/6000 SP that powers the environment here is probably worth $7-million.
But Mr. van Dam says it's only a matter of time until virtual reality
becomes commonplace. "This cave is exotic, one of only 30 or 40 in the
world," he says. "But Moore's law is that every 18 months, compute power
doubles. It will be much less exotic in five years."
Background story from The Chronicle:
A Key for Entering Virtual Worlds (11/16/94)
Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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