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Bill Sherman (Photo by Heather Emmons) |
William “Bill” Sherman knows the value of a virtual reality laboratory and doesn’t need supercomputers or special goggles to see that DRI’s future using a virtual environment looks very bright. Sherman has been named interim director of DRI’s modeling and visualization laboratory, which includes the proposed CAVE® facility. An acronym for “CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment,” it features technology developed at the University of Illinois under the auspices of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
CAVE is aimed at improving DRI’s ability to simulate real-world environments visually and to interact with those simulations in ways that reflect real-world circumstances. The simulation world is nothing new to Sherman who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has been affiliated with that university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications since 1989. In fact, his graduate work involved flight simulation programming, which took him from the computer engineering and science arena into the graphics world.
“Virtual reality didn’t make its big splash until 1991, two years after I began working at NCSA,” Sherman says, whose role there was to help scientists transform their data into visualization—such as helping an aero-engineering professor study air flow and icing on airplane wings or studying the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay to see how pollutants and fertilizers entering the waters were affecting marine life.
As the world of virtual reality was taking off, Sherman was at the helm, helping bridge the gap between computer information and the graphic depiction of resulting data. He has definitely found his niche and wrote about it in his co-authored 2003 book, “Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application and Design.”
Sherman definitely has his work cut out for him: building the CAVE facility at DRI requires a carefully crafted, phased approach. He has already brought two University of Nevada Reno computer science students on board part time to perform computer programming to develop the initial applications. To get the ball rolling, DRI has acquired a six-foot-tall by eight-foot-wide screen to begin the process of matching computer data with visualization. The screen uses head-tracking to change the displayed image as a user’s head moves, as if the object is right in front of the user.
It will take about six months to develop the software needed to advance to the next phase: a four-sided virtual reality space with screens located to the left, front and right of the user and on the floor. Once the four-sided room is running appropriately, the equipment, faculty and capabilities will be ready for their final destination: the six-sided CAVE facility, which adds the ceiling and back wall to simulate any type of environment a scientist may need. The possibilities for DRI scientists to include a virtual reality component in their proposals for grants and research projects are endless.
Visualization technology is quickly becoming a cornerstone of world-class science, and DRI’s CAVE is one of the institute’s most important new projects.
“As I walk down the halls of DRI, I can see that there is a lot of interesting scientific research going on, much of which seems ripe for new visualization and interaction techniques. I think our new laboratory will help scientists see their data in a whole new way,” Sherman says.
Today’s visualization technologies use sight, sound and even touch to present complex data in scientific research applications. They can simulate real-world environments for training and research that are otherwise unavailable or too costly. Fortunately, DRI has acquired a key component to making virtual science a reality for DRI’s scientists—his name is Bill Sherman.
–Heather Emmons
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