ELECTRONIC VISUALIZATION LABORATORY'S AGAVE RESEARCH FUNDED 2001-2004!
Moving Virtual Reality from the Laboratory to the Scientist's Workspace

Chicago, IL--The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year,
$700,000 equipment grant to the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL)
at the University of Illinois at Chicago to develop the AGAVE: Access Grid
Autostereo Virtual Environment.

AGAVE (pronounced agavay) will be a viable, scalable visualization
instrument easily adaptable to the scientist's workspace--particularly
those using the Access Grid (a multi-screen environment that supports
large-scale, distributed group meetings connected by very-high-speed
networks). The Access Grid is an Alliance project anchored by Argonne
National Laboratory. <http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/fl/Accessgrid/>

The goal of AGAVE is to augment the Access Grid to allow national and
international collaborators to immersively share three-dimensional content,
such as scientific and engineering visualizations, without polarized or
shutter glasses. EVL, as an Access Grid node and development partner, will
build AGAVE to be deployable as a separate display screen placed along side
the Access Grid display screens, so that standard 2D content can be viewed
simultaneously with 3D content.

To this end, EVL has prototyped the Varrier(TM) technique for displaying
high-quality, computed autostereograms-in-motion, made possible by the
advent of relatively high-resolution, dimensionally stable LCD panel
technology. With PC graphics in clusters now allowing affordable design and
implementation of arrays of displays, very high resolution can be achieved
by tiling these panels.

Initial prototyping efforts to augment the Access Grid for visualization
has yielded a low-cost, PC-driven passive-stereo projection system, which
allows distributed audiences to view and interact with 3D immersive
content, but still requires the use of passive polarization glasses similar
to those worn to view 3D films. <http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave/>

The AGAVE, tiled, high-resolution autostereo display will be built and
tested over the next three years, and will integrate well with high-speed
networks.

About EVL
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at
Chicago is the nation's oldest interdisciplinary graduate laboratory
offering degrees in electronic visualization. Since inventing the CAVE(R)
Virtual Reality Theater in 1991, EVL's focus has been the development and
deployment of software, hardware, networking and communications tools in
support of collaborative tele-immersive virtual reality applications.
<http://www.evl.uic.edu>

About the Alliance
The National Computational Science Alliance ("The Alliance") is a
nationwide partnership of more than 50 academic, government and business
organizations working together to prototype an advanced computational
infrastructure for the new century. This infrastructure, called the Grid,
is rapidly developing into a ubiquitous, pervasive, national-scale
information infrastructure which links supercomputers, virtual
environments, scientific instruments, large databases and research teams.
<http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/About/Alliance/>