VEG will be working with Thomas Huang's Image Formation and Processing Group at UIUC, which received a million-dollar NSF grant in 1992 to research HDTV.
One area of application is robotics. "You can put a robot in a hostile environment, for example, and see what it is recording through the CAVE's 'eyes,' " DeFanti explains. "This would be integrated with broadcast TV and would be good for deep sea or planetary exploration."
More fundamentally, "VR is heading towards having to invent usable methodology," DeFanti says. "It is precisely where scientific visualization was in 1986--a few smart practitioners, but only the beginnings of clear paradigms of utility."
He describes current VR as just becoming usable for scientific explorations. "I believe we need teraflop computers and 100 Gbps [gigabits per second] networks to get VR to the quality of still images and high-end animations," DeFanti says. "How we get where we want--record it, get back to it, share it, teach it--are all the big challenges."
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