VROOM scientists on VR

Phase and Amplitude Maps of the Electric Organ Discharge of the Weakly Electric Fish, Apteronotus Leptorhynchus--Jim Bower, Chris Assad, and Brian Rasnow, Computational and Neural Systems Program, Caltech; Jason Leigh and Thomas DeFanti, EVL/UIC. (Courtesy of EVL/UIC)

Aimed at probing the workings of the brain, Jim Bower's work at Caltech involves three areas of investigation: behavior analysis, electrophysiology, and computer models.

"All [of these] involve a tremendous amount of data and looking for patterns," says Bower, an associate professor of biology. "The best pattern recognizer is our own nervous system. The more sophisticated we are in exposing [it] to those patterns, the more likely we will understand what's going on."

Previous efforts in VR have involved visualizing simulations of many thousands of neurons and detailed simulations of neurons in the CAVE. The project being shown in VROOM involves weakly electric fish, whose "vision is based on changes in electric fields induced by objects."

"As a mammal, I have no experience with electrical sense," Bower says. "Using VR in the lab, we can try to get some sort of a feel for what electric sense is like."

"We simulate the electric fields on fishes' skin and see how they change," he continues. "These studies generate insight and intuition about a sensory system that we are not familiar with. We're using VR to understand the reality of another animal."

The Caltech team has run simulations on the institute's Intel Touchstone Delta system and is now moving their simulations to the new Intel Paragon. They have also used networked workstations running in parallel.

"With simulations of the brain, VR provides us with a way to use the full pattern capacity of the nervous system," Bower says. "In the fish case, it is the only way to do it."

The Wisconsin research team has developed VIS-5D (Visualization of 5D Datasets), an interactive visualization system that creates a "virtual earth environment." Users interact with a small graphical Earth, either an ocean or an atmosphere, behind the workstation screen. The CAVE allows the team to adapt the application to an immersive environment for the first time. (The image shown is in VIS-5D applied to Hurricane Gilbert.)

"This is a takeoff on something we have done at the American Meteorological Society meeting," says Bill Hibbard, researcher at the center. "We ran a weather model in Madison every night; it was a two-day forecast of the U.S. We brought the forecast results to the booth over the Internet and showed it on the workstation. Attendees could use it to get a clear idea of weather for their flights."

Hibbard says that the weather forecast is usually very general. What people really want to know is if it is going to be raining at 3 p.m. in their hometowns, for instance.

"This system lets people ask these very specific questions," Hibbard says. "It is high-resolution in both space and time."

Since last summer, Ed Seidel and his NCSA colleagues have been using the CAVE to look at the evolution of gravitational waves in a 3D spacetime.

"If you have 1 million zones in 3D, it is very difficult to understand the evolution of the system on a 2D screen with 2D graphics," explains Seidel, research scientist in gravitation and team leader of the Gravitation Group. "The CAVE allows us to go in and out of the system in a 3D, intuitive way and allows us to identify features--which might be just behind us--that we might overlook in a traditional graphics environment."

Beyond their initial Supercomputing '93 effort, Seidel would like to add several features to their CAVE software. These include interactive control of the simulation code on the CM-5 and extraction of quantitative information--something Seidel feels has been lacking in scientific visualization.

"You don't have the capability to analyze things quantitatively," he says. "We want to get this back into visualization and into the CAVE--put this question of measures into the visualization software."