Acquisition of a Visroom for Cognitive Studies, Visualization, and Education

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Insturmentation Award, Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering will acquire a fully enclosed, six-sided, 3m x 3m x 2.7m, back projected virtual reality environment. The VisRoom will be located in a specially constructed 30 foot cube in the atrium of the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Science (CIEMAS). The VisRoom will be the only facility of its kind in the Southeast and the fourth such system in the United States. As the datasets scientists collect increase in size and complexity, so increases the need for ever more powerful tools to support data analysis and scientific communication. The tools that in the past have proved most useful in this regard have been those that take advantage of the remarkable information-processing ability built into human perceptual systems, particularly vision and audition. Thus, investigators in many of the most innovative fields of research, e.g., proteomics, genomics, seismology, neuroscience and astrophysics, rely heavily on computationally-intensive visualization tools to explore their data and test models. Technologies such as the VisRoom are used not only to explore data collected through other means, but also as experimental tools in and of themselves for investigating the many aspects of human perception and motor control that remain poorly understood. The project directors anticipate that providing scientists from many disciplines with access to state-of-the-art visualization technologies will inspire them to find creative and productive ways of incorporating the new tools into their respective research programs. Projects curently planned for this VisRoom include research in cognitive neuroscience, exploration of 3D structures, and education. Specifically, visual perception studies will take advantage of the VisRoom's ability to precisely control illumination, object reflectances, and scene geometry to assess how systematic manipulations chage the observers' perceptions of color. Movement studies will dynamically distort the visual field during reaching tasks to gain insight into the role of attention, movement planning, and movement execution. Computer scientists and biochemists will jointly use the VisRoom to 'crawl' between two proteins to inspect the interaction areas directly. Biomedical engineers who develop physiological models of the heart will use the VisRoom to 'enter' the heart wall and investigate the relationships among the different physiological processes that govern cardiac function. Finally, middle school students will use the VisRoom as an aid in the study of developmental biology. For example, they will have the opportunity to interact with a virtual developing chicken embryo and observe how, at 48 hours, the single tube of the artery system curves in 3D to form the four chambers of the heart. In addition to providing scientists and educators with a with a powerful new visualization tool, the project directors anticipate that the VisRoom will act as a "watering hole," supporting the kind of cross-disciplinary interaction that often opens up new areas of scientific research.