Sunday, November, 22, 2009

Affordable Virtual Reality

John-e-Box

The John-e-Box prototype being used for molecular visualization.

The John-e-Box is a portable, large-format, passive stereo display system developed in Indiana University's Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL), in collaboration with the Indiana University Department of Chemistry. It leverages recent advances in commodity-grade components including small, bright, digital projectors; powerful PC processors and graphics cards; and flexible, open source software tools. The increasing power, affordability, and usability of these systems allows technology groups to deploy these systems directly into labs and classrooms where they can have maximum impact and can be fully integrated with the University's outstanding infrastructure and resources for networking, computing, storage, and telecommunications. As such, the John-e-Box is a key component of ongoing plans to deliver the capabilities of advanced visualization displays directly into the labs, classrooms, and studios of the University's researchers, educators, and artists, creating a technological bridge to high-end display installations like the CAVE.

The John-e-Box folded and ready for transport.

The John-e-Box has been licensed to and commercialized by Indianapolis-based CAE-net, Inc. An initial deployment of eight systems is underway on the IU Bloomington, IUPUI, IU East, and IU Northwest campuses as part of the Analysis and Visualization of Instrument-Driven Data (AVIDD) system, funded through an NSF/MRI grant. For more information on the commercial availability of the John-e-box system, please visit the CAE-net home page.

Software available for Linux

Virtual reality libraries
- CAVELib - Commercial package for CAVE programming
- FreeVR - An open source package in the works, designed to replace the CAVE libs.
- VR Juggler - An open source package that works in Unix as well as Windows.
Graphics API's for general graphics programming
- Inventor for Linux - This format is similar to the old VRML format, and is a very good API for scientific visualization. Includes scene-graph support, as well as it's own GUI.
- Performer for Linux - This API is especially good for visual simulation applications, such as flight simulators.
- OpenGL - Not Linux specific, but a good source for graphics programmers in general. Those who want to use nVIDIA cards under Linux will want to see their drivers for Linux page.
- This Spaceball Library - Useful for incorporating a spaceball into a graphics program.

Some Hardware Resources

A good source for projector information is Projector Central, with projector prices, comparisons, as well as simple calculators to determine projection distances, etc.
There are several projects that are using similar technology to that used in the John-e-Box. They include the AGAVE, at EVL, as well as the GeoWall, which is an AGAVE with Geology as the specific target.