Course #9: Implementation of Immersive Virtual Environments Full day course on Monday, July 27 course chair: Steve Bryson -- NASA Ames (Virtual Windtunnel) Lecturers: Chuck Blanchard -- VPL Research William Bricken -- HITlab Lew Hitchner -- NASA Ames (virtual planetary exploration) Rick Jacoby -- NASA Ames (VIEW lab) Creon Levit -- NASA Ames (Virtual Windtunnel) Warren Robinett -- UNC Description: This course will describe the implementation of fully immersive virtual environments. The integration of hardware, software, and program design resulting in creating the illusion of virtual worlds will be covered. Developers who have designed the most famous and successful virtual worlds (that's us!) will discuss their work on a detailed level. Objectives: After taking this course, the attendee will have a greater understanding of how to develop a fully immersive interactive virtual environment. Solutions to difficulties in the integration of hardware and software into a responsive, high performance system will be covered. Through several examples, various options in the development of virtual worlds will be learned. The attendee will know how to select the hardware for a particular virtual environment, outline the appropriate software structure, and implement that structure in a way which will give the greatest possible performance. Difficulty: This course will require a moderate maturity in graphics programming and some awareness of interfacing serial devices to computers. Concepts such as transformation matrices, use of graphic libraries and basic cartesian coordinates will be assumed. No knowledge of virtual environments will be required. Who should attend: This course is intended for those who wish to know how to design and implement working high-performance immersive interactive virtual environments. Course level: intermediate TENTATIVE Syllabus: I Introduction to Virtual Environment Technology and Software Concepts -- Steve Bryson Introduction Body tracking hardware and software Immersive display hardware and software Other interface technologies Human Factors issues Computation and graphic environments Basic system integration II How successful applications and systems were designed, by those who designed them -- This will be a series of short (40 min) talks by the lecturers. They will dscribe the design philosophies behind their systems, the realtionship between the task those systems perform and their design, and the tradeoffs that made their systems work. TENTATIVE examples (not in order) include: The virtual telerobot, control and the integration of many interface concepts (Jacoby) The virtual windtunnel, using computationally intensive virtual visualization tools (Levit) A general system for virtual environment research (Robinett) Virtual terrain environments and large database handling (Hitchner) Virtual environments involving networked systems (Bricken) Developing interesting and fun environments for the commercial world (Blanchard) Recommended reading: Howard Rheingold's book 'Virtual Reality' Myron Kreuger's book 'Artificial Reality 2' Steve Bryson and Creon Levit "The Virtual Windtunnel", proceedings IEEE Visualization '91. Biographies: Course Chair: Steve Bryson Steve Bryson is an employee of Computer Sciences Corporation working under contract for the Applied Research Office of the Numerical Aerodynamics Simulation Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center. In this position he is researching the use of virtual environment technology in various fields of scientific visualization, primarily the visualization of fluid flow. Prior to this position, he worked at the NASA Ames VIEW lab developing the first fully integrated virtual environment facility. Prior to that he worked for VPL Research, Inc., a small company devoted to the development of virtual environment technology. Steve Bryson's formal training is in mathematical physics, and he is most interested in virtual reality as a way to express abstract concepts and understand the real physical world. He currently teaches popular adult and children's classes in theoretical physics at the California Academy of Sciences. He is an active amateur musician, and has written sound tracks for sky shows at Chicago's Adler Planetarium. Instructors: Chuck Blanchard: Chuck Blanchard is currently at VPL Research, Inc. where he has been primarily responsible for the development of 'body electric', a dataflow system for designing virtual environments. Mr. Blanchard has been at VPL since 1985. William Bricken: Dr. William Bricken is the Principal Scientist at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington, where he is designing and implementing the Virtual Environment Operating System and the interactive tools of the VR environment. His prior positions include Director of the Autodesk Research Lab, which developed the Cyberspace CAD application of virtual reality, and Principal Scientist at ADS, where he pioneered high-performance inference engines, visual programming systems, and instructable interfaces. Dr. Bricken holds a multidisciplinary PhD in Research Methodology, Education, Computer Science, and Psychology from Stanford, and degrees in Statistics (MS Stanford), Education (DipEd, Monash Australia), and Social Psychology (BA, UCLA). He specializes in experiential mathematics and void-based computation. Lew Hitchner: Lew Hitchner's education includes a bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Dartmouth College, an M.S. degree in Operations Research from Berkeley, and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the Univ. of Utah. At Utah he studied graphics and digital image processing. His dissertation topic was on software for true 3D volumetric displays. He also worked on remote sensing and medical image processing at Utah. His introduction to computer science was in 1962 when he graduated from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering Summer Session for Secondary School Students in Computer Mathematics and Programming, an NSF funded project taught by Moore School graduate student Andries Van Dam. Lew's employment history includes 5 years as an Operations Research analyst in the MIS Dept. of ICI, America, Inc., "several" years as a Teaching and Research Asst. in Geography and Computer Science Depts. at Univ. of Utah, and 5 years on the Computer Science faculty at Univ. of Calif., Santa Cruz. At UCSC he taught undergrad and graduate computer graphics and digital image processing courses and conducted research in digital image compression and in the application of human visual perception to computer graphics and digital image processing. Prior to taking his current position he spent 9 months as a Visiting Scientist in the Image Science and Applications Dept., IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center. For the past 2 1/2 years Lew has been a Scientist at RIACS (Res. Inst. for Advanced Computer Science) at NASA Ames Research Center. While in this position he has been the technical director of the Virtual Planetary Exploration (VPE) project. VPE utilizes virtual environment techniques to provide "virtual exploration" of terrain surfaces of Mars and other planets to planetary geologists, mission planners, and mission operations managers. Rick Jacoby: Rick Jacoby received his BS degrees in Physics and Mathematics at California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo, and an MA in physics at the University of California at Davis. He has been an employee of Sterling Software at NASA Ames Research Center for the past 16 years, where he has lead teams and participated in the development of several simulation systems. For the past four years he has lead development of the software used in the Virtual Interactive Environment Workstation (VIEW) lab. Rick is married and has a six year old daughter. He enjoys creating wood sculptures whenever he has the time. Creon Levit: Creon Levit received his BS in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis in 1982. He joined NASA Ames Research Center later that year. For the last several years, he has been persuing research in computational aerodynamics on massively parallel computers and in numerical flow visualization using computer graphics and virtual environments. Warren Robinett: Warren Robinett is a designer of interactive computer graphics software and hardware. He was educated at Rice University and Berkeley, receiving a BA in "Computer Applications to Language and Art" in 1974 and an MS in Computer Science in 1976. In 1978, he designed the Atari video game Adventure, the first graphical adventure game. In 1980 he was co-founder and chief software engineer at The Learning Company, a publisher of educational software. There he designed Rocky's Boots, a computer game which teaches digital logic to 11-year-old children. Rocky's Boots won Software of the Year awards from three magazines in 1983. In 1986 Robinett worked as a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, where he designed the software for the Virtual Environment Workstation, NASA's pioneering virtual reality project. In 1989, he came to the University of North Carolina to direct the Head-Mounted Display Project. In 1992, he became co-director of the Nanomanipulator Project at UNC, which interfaces a scanning-tunneling microscope to a head-mounted display to allow micro-teleoperation at atomic scale on the surface of a sample beneath the microscope.