Science at the Speed of Thought - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 6

transparent or invisible, change the scale of objects, move through objects at
will, and so on.
IVE provides a true three-dimensional (3D) view of data. But IV provides
more than another dimension. Because our natural habitat is 3D, we bring with
us into the IV environment all our understanding of relationships in a 3D world.
So we do not have to try to understand the relationships we see. We comprehend
them naturally.
The IVE is also a scientific instrument like any other. It requires multiple
types of calibration and specialized software, for example. But it is also a scien-
tific instrument unlike any other. While it is a finite physical space defined by
the physical setup, it is also an infinite virtual space where we can wander indef-
initely. It is up to the visualization scientists to decide what to put in the space
and how to arrange it. Things at very different scales or types can be placed side
by side. For example, a nanostructure can be placed next to a plot of one of its
properties. In fact, immersive visualization is where scientific visualization and
information visualization [19] can be joined.
Our philosophy for the IVE is similar to the philosophy for the distributed
computing environment. It is loosely coupled. In this context, we mean we do
not have a single monolithic program but rather a collection of small programs
that can be snapped together to create new programs. Each small program is
good at doing one thing well. All are designed to work together.
There are three ways we join programs together:
- UNIX [20] pipes and filters for creation and transformation
- Dynamically Shared Objects (DSO's) for functionality
- scenegraph objects for simple placement.
This gives us the generality, flexibility, and speed that we need for the VL.
We have four main categories of tools:
1. IV Infrastructure software
2. IV Representation Software
3. IV Scene Interaction Software
4. IV Collaboration Software
We will discuss each of these in turn.
IV Infrastructure Software. This is software to get visualizations into the
IVE and interact with the IVE hardware. We use as our base software the open
source software DIVERSE [21] in our IV environment. It uses OpenGL Performer
[22] to create a scenegraph that places the objects in the immersive environment.
That means that anything that can be loaded into Performer can be immediately
loaded into the IVE. It also means that getting a data set into the IVE may
require writing a simple filter to convert one file format to another. New file
loaders can be written and we have created some for special needs.
IV Representation Software. In the context of an IVE, representation refers
to the process of transforming raw data into a visual geometric format that can be