to serve, support, and collaborate with faculty, students, and industry to be a leader in scientific visualization,and human computer interaction, through learning, discovery, and engagement.
|
| News | Gallery | Video |

Overview

Why?

Advances in computing platforms and instrumentation techniques have resulted in an exponential growth of data. Efficient interpretation of this data is fast emerging as a key challenge in science, engineering, and business. The human-computer interface has emerged as a major information bottleneck: computer speeds increase, but human comprehension is a datum. Novel techniques must therefore be developed to effectively utilize the information capacity available to human comprehension. Large-scale visualization, graphics, and haptic devices have emerged as key technologies in this realm. The proposed project aims to integrate these technologies into a perceptually coherent strategy for assisting researchers and educators become significantly more effective. We call this framework perceptualization to stress that the integrated whole is bigger than the sum of individual parts. The Envision Center for Data Perceptualization is a major facility for perceptualization research and for applications' visualization needs. Supporting research, education and outreach campus-wide, the facility will leverage sponsored research with equipment and research that fashions new paradigms for perceptualization and closes infrastructure gaps to exploit emerging technology.

What?

The Envision Center is organized under the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and serves the computational visualization needs of the greater Purdue University community. The mission of visualization computing is to serve, support and collaborate with faculty, students, and industry to be a leader in scientific visualization for discovery, learning, and engagement. A shared high performance visualization facility and teaching lab will be created and supported. The overall goal is to produce a world-class facility and collaborative environment for Discovery, Engagement, and Learning in visualization computing.

The Envision Center is a unique blend of computer science, engineering, perception, technology, and art that is used to process and display information through the use of computer graphics. Ultimately, computer graphics is used as a form of communications and has applications in every discipline, business, and industry. Advances in science and commerce have often been led by inventions that allowed people to see old things in new ways or to see things for the first time. The invention of the telescope, microscope, and oscilloscope are a few examples. Computers combine both new computational instruments and new visual representation resulting in powerful tools for advancing science and commerce. The Envision Center facilities and initiatives at Purdue will advance science and commerce in new and unimagined ways.

How?

Visualization computing at Purdue will serve two related but quite distinct purposes. The first purpose is to use computer graphics to create or discover the idea itself through the special properties of visual perception; that is, using vision to think and solve fundamental in all disciplines. The second purpose is to communicate an existing idea using computer graphics. After the idea is created or discovered computer graphics can be used to effectively communicate it to others. The visualization facilities will support both the discovery and communication of new ideas.

In the real-world, humans have the natural ability to perceive several things effectively through a combination of multiple sensory modes (such as visual, haptic, spatial, aural, verbal, aroma, etc.). Humans have an innate capability to seamlessly communicate, perceive, and interact (called multimodal interaction) with others and the environment using these modes. Large scale immersive visualization systems provide good visual perception. Going beyond the human visual systems, haptic interaction add another dimension to the human experience when dealing with complex problems and research output. Haptic devices are used to physically interact with the date through force feedback mechanisms. To provide natural and intuitive interface to the researcher, in addition to haptics (for force feedback), other sensory modes such as 3-dimensional (3D) 6 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) input trackers (for spatial tracking of hand and head position and orientation), gloves (for fingers gesture recognition), voice recognition (for speech input), synthesized speech/sound output (for acoustic feedback), will be included and interfaced with visualization displays. Several input and output modalities combined effectively with the visualization facilities will help researchers to interact - easily, naturally, and effectively - with their complex data sets and perceive new ideas that are possible without these tools.

Another area to be supported will include data visualization through the use of computer graphics and 3D display devices. Data or information visualization is the conversion of large data sets of non-physical information into a visual through the use of computer graphics. Data visualization can increase the comprehension of huge amounts of data and allows for the perception of emergent properties that were not anticipated.

The Envision Center will be an interdisciplinary, high-performance visualization showcase facility to support research and teaching at Purdue University. Students (undergraduate and graduate) will be exposed to the latest technology in visualization computing through the use of the facility for instruction and their active involvement in research project. Purdue faculty will use Envision to dis0play and visually interact with scientific data in innovative ways. This nationally unique facility will allow Purdue the opportunity to advance the scientific fields of visualization and perceptualization through research and development of computer graphics hardware and software. Through the use of glass walls and partitions, the physical structure of Envision will allow users and visitors to see into most work areas when in the facility and from the walkway outside. The overall goal is to produce a world-class facility and collaborative environment in visualization computing to support discovery, learning, and engagement at Purdue University.

The proposed facility is a corner stone of a recently approved $1.7M National Science Foundation grant for Major Research Instrumentation. The proposal is a collaborative venture between the public and private sector, with NSF contributing $862,000, Purdue $730,326 for equipment and $2,000,000 for facility construction, and corporate partners (IBM and Intel) with in-kind donations worth $327,467.

|Site Map | ©2004-2008 Envision Center at Purdue University, all rights reserved.