University of Illinois at Chicago: Virtual Reality’s CAVE Pioneer

"There are Paleolithic and Mesolithic caves tucked away in many corners of the globe. There also are many CAVEs — cave automatic virtual environments — found in ­Austria, Japan and cities throughout the United States.
But the very first — and trademarked — CAVE was built at the University of Illinois at Chicago and demonstrated in 1992. Today, UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory invites researchers, artists, students and other stakeholders to step into CAVE2 — a virtual reality environment unlike any other."

Read the Full EDTECH Article Here

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CAVE2 on TIME online: Using 3D Worlds to Visualize Data

"Take a walk through a human brain? Fly over the surface of Mars? Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago are pushing science fiction closer to reality with a wraparound virtual world where a researcher wearing 3D glasses can do all that and more"

Read Full Article Here

CAVE2 got a nice amount of press coverage lately. Through open house days and other demos we already had hundred of visitors experiencing the system. It is great so see so many people excited about what we do in EVL!

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Blood Components Interactive

Autumn Kulaga is a Biomedical Visualization student at UIC. During the fall 2012 semester, she developed an interactive visualization app for the OmegaDesk workstation at EVL. The application allows users to learn about the components of human blood, and view detailed models of them in 3D. Autumn designed a fully multimodal application, using both the touch screen and Kinect interface of the OmegaDesk platform. She developed the application as a python script in omegalib.

See a video of her application here!

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omegalib 3.3 released

omegalib 3.3 integrates various changes merged from the 4.0 branch, mostly involving advanced GUI support, optimizations and GUI render-to-texture. Prebuilt version is much better on windows, and python scripts can now be launched from any directory on all platforms. Major revisions on cyclops shader, material and light support.

C++ and python API documentation has also been updated to reflect 3.3 chances. A new page on the wiki lists python examples, here: https://code.google.com/p/omegalib/wiki/PythonExamples

Major Changes

omega

• various bugfixes 
• followTrackable moved from cyclops Entity to SceneNode?
• Equalizer CUDA support disabled by default 
• ISceneObject >> NodeComponent?
• SceneNode? facing camera support 

omegaToolkit

• removed obsolete SceneRenderable? classes

misc

• updated MakeDistro? batch 
• updated examples 
• new examples 
• python scripts can run from any directory now 
• merged changes from v4.0 branch

cyclops

• Started revising Effect support to use Materials for high-frequency property changes to objects. 
• Separate cyclops light functions and Custom light shader function support 
• Entity.castShadow 
• shaders - ambient accumulated for all lights 
• added Spot and Directional lights 
• added support for light attenuation 
• added support for custom light functions 
• shader uniforms can be specified in Python scripts 
• shaders can be embedded in code instead of loading them from a separate file 
• added shader source caching. 
• revised examples

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