Facilities

6-sided Cube: 10’x10’x10’ fully-immersive, virtual reality room next-generation Cave™-environment

This facility, funded under NSF MRI grant 0079800, primarily supports fully immersive perceptual and cognitive psychology experiments.  The visual, aural, and haptic environment during human testing can be controlled, manipulated, and recorded.  The graphics generation and data gathering subsystems in this environment are powered by 40-node cluster of personal computers and RAID6 storage systems.  Ultrasonic and magnetic head and hand tracking is available.

 

 

The CAVE™

The world’s first room-sized immersive environment, this three-wall and a floor projection space has been in operation since 1995 and continues to be a valuable development space for projects destined for stable human-subject research in the Cube.  Powered by a monolithic SGI graphics supercomputer, a pc cluster or a monolithic Windows/Intel/nVidia computer-in-a-box, researchers have available a space to develop new applications and human interface devices without disturbing long-term experiments in other ISL immersive environments.

 

 

The CANVAS (Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio)

This permanent electronic gallery at the Krannert Art Museum is a three-walled immersive space using circularly polarized passive stereo technology driven by a pc cluster.  Connected to the Internet with gigabit networking, this space is used by artists to develop stand-alone or collaborative art projects in real-time and to display curated exhibits, the first of which, CalculArt, ended in 2006.

 

 

The Traveling CANVAS

A portable version of the CANVAS, this system can be rapidly deployed in large gallery spaces, conferences and symposia.

 

 

Driving Simulator

The ISL Driving Simulator is based on a KQ Hyperion (now DriveSafety) driving simulator.  Built on a full-car General Motors Saturn automobile, the simulator surrounds the auto's occupant with eight projected images driven by a recently (2008) upgraded visualization pc cluster.  Head and eye tracking, spatialized sonification, visual and haptic feedback are integrated into the simulator's software for research in human-automobile interaction.

 

 

Flight Simulator

Based on a Frasca 142 simulator cockpit, the ISL flight simulator has over its life and continues to undergo improvements based on the current state of the art in graphics engines and the needs of the Human Factors researchers’ future projects.  Presently driven by an Evans & Sutherland 3-graphics-channel cluster, development is underway to allow more open-source graphics engines to drive both the large-screen environment and LCD cockpit displays.

 

 

Large vertical wall displays – ImmersaDesks™

The ISL houses five 4’x6’ vertical immersive displays.  They support monocular and stereo vision, head, eye, and hand tracking, and incorporate surround sound speaker systems.  Two of the displays are portable and are appropriate resources for demonstrating technologies at symposia and workshops.

 

 

Horizontal display – Horizontal ImmersaDesk™

The 4’x6’ horizontal immersive environment is appropriate for “sand table” style applications.  Typically driven by a small pc cluster, monolithic deskside graphics supercomputers are also used in visualizations requiring large active memory accessed by several processors, such a the visible human dataset.  This system is designed for convenient shipping and quick-reinstallation.

 

 

Motion Analysis motion capture system

This ten-Eagle-camera optical motion capture system is typically resident in a dedicated laboratory but can be relocated into various environments more suitable for the motion under study.  Primary users are professors of kinesiology and dance.  Used in projects as diverse as large-space physics experiments and facial gesture recognition, fast computers, large data storage capacity and current off-line analysis software make this system extremely versatile.

 

 

Computing Resources:

 

 

Peripheral Devices

 

 

Collaborative Resources

 

 

Support Services

The ISL has a full-time secretary, four full-time systems/application programmers, a full-time electronics technician and access to a 2000 square foot in-house mechanical/electrical shop facility.   Housed in a 14,000 square foot facility, the ISL is able to add/modify simulator environments to suit the particular research needs of a project while maintaining extant facilities for ongoing research.

 

 

Collaborative agreements

We have developed operational arrangements in which we share system development and applications with J. Sullivan at the PORTAL at TU Berlin, with R. Brady and D. Zielinski at the DiVE at Duke University and with M. Zuffo at the CAVERNA at the University of São Paulo, all institutions with large-space immersive visualization facilities.  An additional operational agreement has recently been concluded with Wolfram Research to collaborate on a Mathematica front-end for immersive spaces.