Welcome to the NCSA VR lab ftp archive.

The Virtual Reality Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) has been investigating the use of immersive
technologies as a means for scientific visualization over the past
two years.  During this period, several custom applications were
developed to look at very specific data sets.  Also during this time,
some tools and papers of potential interest to a wide community were
created.  This directory tree contains material that might be of interest.

The Papers subdirectory contains a paper on integrating virtual
reality hardware with dataflow packages.  Prototype modules were
developed on an alpha version of SGI's IRIS Explorer package.  Modules
will be made widely available as they are ported to the official
release of version 2.0 of IRIS Explorer.

The Virtual_Devices subdirectory contains two utilities that allow
some VR application development to be done off-line at a programmer's
desk-top workstation.  These utilities allow more of the time at a VR
facility to have applications being used by researchers to explore.
The idea for these utilities came about while working on the Explorer
VR modules.  It was apparent, that most of the time developing code
didn't require the use of the equipment, and the small percentage of
the time moving the virtual reality devices was to make small movements
in them to see if they registered properly with the application display.

The two utilities contained on this disk are for a virtual BOOM, and
a generic 6-D tracker device.  There are plans for several more tools
following the same idea.  Glove interfaces, and an interface for the
CAVE are examples of what is in store.

NCSA tries to provide a variety of VR technology to give a user the
opportunity to experiment with different immersive modalities.  This
summer, NCSA is collaborating with the Electronic Visualization Lab
(EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago to create a CAVE at
NCSA.  Thus we will be developing both an emulation interface, and
an Explorer module interface for the CAVE.

To obtain more information about VR at NCSA, and/or current copies
of tools and papers created here, you can check the NCSA World-Wide-
Web (WWW) information server (perhaps using NCSA's XMosaic information
browser).  Use the URL "http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Viz/VR/vr_homepage.html"
to access the NCSA VR information.  This ftp site will be updated as
more items of interest are created.  The coordinator of NCSA's VR
lab is Bill Sherman (wsherman@ncsa.uiuc.edu).

	Bill Sherman
	VR Coordinator
	National Center for Supercomputing Applications
	605 E. Springfield, Ave.
	Champaign, IL  61820
	wsherman@ncsa.uiuc.edu

.