VR Juggler—Image/Project Gallery

Table of contents

• VR Juggler
• CuevaDeFuego
• CFD in VR
• Cave Quake ]I[ Arena
• MetVR

VR Juggler

Created at Virtual Reality Applications Center by The VR Juggler Team

CuevaDeFuego

Created at Virtual Reality Applications Center by Terry Welsh and Jeremy Eccles

Cuevadefuego demonstrates the potential for photo-realistic visualization of a spacious geological structure within a synthetic environment. Its bubbling lava, swinging pendulum and burning torches illustrate the real-time application of effects such as animation, lighting models, and reflection that commonly are only possible in frame-by-frame rendering.

This world was developed in conjunction with the German National Research Center for Information Technology, Sankt Augustin, Germany. It was part of their "Caveland on Cyberstage" showcase at the CEBIT '97 Festival in Germany.

Cuevadefuego represents approximately 501 hours of labor. It was designed and built using MultiGen II, Performer libraries, Audio Works, and Photoshop. The 18.1 megabyte database is comprised of 131,647 triangles and 46 level of detail nodes. It is accompanied by 16.6 megabytes of textures and 13.8 megabytes of sound. It was originally created using CAVElib, then ported to VR Juggler in about an hour.

CFD in VR

VE-Suite

The main goal is to visualize and integrate a generalize reader to support the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) or scientific data obtained from available commercial softwares such as STAR-CD, FLUENT, Fire, PLOT3D, etc.

Focus on CFD and VR, as tools to analyze designs for less cost in manufacturing technology. Application in CFD and virtual reality simulation provide analysis of fluid flow problems in detail. These processes are faster than testing and simulates at an earlier stage in the design cycle for less cost. Integration of CFD and VR provide advance interfaces to enable visual, haptic, and audio interaction between users and computer generated virtual environments. 

The advantages identified in using CFD and VR are:

1. Visualization helps users comprehend large quantities of data.
2. Visual attributes can present abstract representations of data.
3. Relationships among displayed entities become apparent. 
4. Graphical techniques allow more direct intuitive interactions with the entities of interest. 

The interactive tool in this application is using wand to select a virtual menu and by using virtual cursor to place different flow phenomenon such as streamlines, 3-D momentum profiles, contour planes, etc. Animated features included are particle tracing in streamlines and transition of different isosurface values.

Tools used for development are:

• VR Juggler
• VTK - Visualization Toolkits
• OpenGL Performer
• OpenMP
• Star-CD

Current development:

1. An octree-based data structure for viewing large unstructured grid data sets.
2. Simplification of large unstructured data sets.

Cave Quake ]I[ Arena

CQ3A is a viewer for Quake ]I[ Arena (id software) levels. Source code written at NCSA by Paul Ralich, code based on Steve Taylor's Aftershock engine

CQ3A is a Quake3 renderer for the CAVE and other cave-like devices! It can also be used with various other VR devices or run on a regular desktop. It is based on Steve Taylor's wonderful Aftershock engine. Includes simple collision detection and improved performance by adding support for multi-texturing and compiled vertex arrays. The AS engine is restructured so that it can be used with several VR interfaces.

With VR Juggler, CQ3A has been tested to run on IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.
CQ3A software has also been ported to CAVElib(tm), GLUT, FreeVR, MP SDK, SDL, and GLX.

MetVR

Created at Visualization, Analysis and Imaging Laboratory Engineering Research Center, Mississippi State University


MetVR's web page

Other info: MSU is using VR Juggler for several applications: Meteorology Visualization, Oceanographic Vis, and also a combined application to visualize Meteorological and Oceanographic data simultaneously.