ASET 2006-07 Annual Report
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For the last several years, GEaRS group has worked to establish visualization and VR facilities in several colleges, functionally designed for and in close proximity to the user base to be served. That trend has been continued during the 2006-07 reporting period, both through the ongoing upgrade and user support for established labs, and through the formation of new partnerships through which additional facilities and currently under construction and planning.
The Immersive Construction (ICon) Lab is a partnership between the Visualization Group and the Department of Architectural Engineering. Current teaching and research in the lab focus on the use immersive visualization displays and underlying Building Information Databases (BIM) within construction planning and project management processes. The lab also has provided a unique venue for hosting work sessions and presentations for high-profile student activities such as A/E undergraduate thesis projects, the Solar Decathlon, College of Engineering Majors Night, and other recruiting or outreach activities of the department and college. Building upon the strength architectural engineering faculty research in the ICon Lab, Penn State has been selected to host the CONVR conference, an annual international conferences for researchers in construction applications of VR, in October 2007. More information is available via the CONVR 2007 Web site.
During the 2006-07 reporting period, construction was completed on a new Immersive Environments Lab (IEL) that was designed and for dedicated space in the Stuckemann Family Building, home to the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The new lab employs refinements in screen structure design and projector technology, an upgraded display console and supported applications base. Activity in the lab builds upon prior teaching in undergraduate architectural design studio as well research into deploying immersive display technologies in architectural and landscape study and practice.
A key activity in the IEL for this reporting period has been the installation of dedicated teleconferencing equipment for conducting a Participatory Design Studio involving third-year architectural design students from Penn State and Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Students were divided into self-selected teams of four students. Each team included two Penn State Students and two Carleton students. The student teams worked together-at-a-distance on project proposals for a hypothetical Museum of Vertical Flight on the University Park campus. The PDS employed large-format immersive displays, combined with distributed 3-D design applications and SD video and voice teleconferencing to provide a flexible, richly featured and high-fidelity environment for group collaboration and communication within the context of architectural design studio. More information is available via the spring 2007 Academic Computing news article "Tele-collaborative Architectural Design Studio and E-Learning."
The IEL and Icon provided the context for several masters thesis studies during the 2006-07 period. Thesis topics and related research have included: 1) evaluation of how various formal attributes of VR display systems may affect participant understanding of architectural spaces; 2) evaluation of construction planning workgroup communication patterns and decision making when facilitated by interactive, large format VR displays; 3) design and evaluation of interactive interfaces related to large-project construction planning activities; and, 4) evaluation of student team learning outcomes in tele-collaborative design studio environments. Both the IEL and ICon labs are available and often used to host special sessions on visualization and/or VR as supporting sessions for Penn State courses or as outreach events extending beyond the course work or research conducted within the respective facility partner departments.
GEaRS continues to provide systems integration and application development support for the 3-D visualization and VR system in 215 Osmond Lab. The facility targets the central campus science community. Initial application investigations have been conducted in materials science and gravitational physics; and the facility has been used as part of GEaRS seminars on molecular dynamics visualization software such as VMD. The facility includes a floor-to-ceiling, rear-projected, 3-D stereoscopic display attached to a graphics workstation with 3-D motion tracking devices for user interaction. The system allows human scale, interactive, 3-D data visualization of complex data or results from numerically intensive simulations.
The Lasch Sports Medicine VR Lab continues to provide a venue for experimental trials combining VR display and subject instrumentation for assessing the effects of mild brain trauma on posture and balance. Several research publications have resulted from trials conducted in the Lasch lab (see publications list). An upgraded lab is being designed for Rec Hall to build upon and broaden the applicability of work done in the Lasch lab (see below).
GEaRS has entered into partnerships on two new visualization and VR facilities to be located for convenient access by research communities on the west end of the University Park campus.
Deployment of Access Grid tele-collaborative facilities and related community support continue in GEaRS' Visualization Group.
