The Metaverse: A Laboratory for Digital Media Networks

The primary goal of our research is to investigate and develop new techniques to support networked, collaborative, visually immersive environments and applications. The objective is to design visually compelling collaborative spaces (where people interact with computer simulations and each other) that are inexpensive, extensible, automatically configurable, adaptable, and scalable. The work involves an interdisciplinary team of researchers exploring system-level issues including visualization, network communication, and computer vision, with others studying application-level issues such as scientific (CFD) visualization, presentation of new-media/art, and the educational efficacy and impact of the technology. The requested infrastructure will be used to create three physically separate, networked visualization laboratories supported by two new technical staff. Each visualization environment will have a distinct configuration and objective. The CORE (COllaborative Rendering Environment) will explore compelling collaborative immersive spaces, while the VIDE (Visually Immersive Display Environment) investigates stereo visualization. Unlike the CORE and VIDE, where users are immersed in pixels, the DOME (Digital Object Media Environment) will be a head-tracked ``outside looking in'' configuration. The environments will demonstrate the versatility of the underlying base technology by using the same techniques to support multiple application domains. A fourth environment will be deployed at the University of Puerto Rico.