CITRIS Research Exchange: Enabling Scientific Workflows in Virtual Reality

Contact Address Label:
Yvette Subramanian

Location:
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building, the Maria & Dado Banatao Conference Room, UC Berkeley

Summary:

Oliver Kreylo's talk on virtual reality can be viewed online at mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/Oliver_Kreylos-9_27_06

Description:

"Enabling Scientific Workflows in Virtual Reality" by Oliver Kreylos, Researcher, Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing, UC Davis.

12:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 27 in 290 HMMB, UC Berkeley, as part of the CITRIS Research Exchange. The complete schedule for the fall semester is online at RE-fall2006.

This talk can be viewed online at mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/Oliver_Kreylos-9_27_06

Abstract:
While immersive and virtual reality (VR) methods offer substantial benefits for scientific visualization, and the scientific process in general, scientists have been very reluctant to apply such methods to their work. We believe there are several reasons for this lack of acceptance, the most important being low price/performance ratios caused by the combination of expensive hardware and software that does not realize the full benefits of VR.

In this talk, we will discuss these reasons in more detail, and describe how software based on 3D perception and interaction through direct manipulation -- implemented by programs designed specifically for VR -- can help integrate immersive visualization into the scientific workflow. As case studies, we will present geoscience applications that have recently been encountered in the context of the UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES).

Biography:
Dr. Kreylos is an assistant project scientist with the UC Davis Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), and is affiliated with the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization (IDAV) and the W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). He received a Dipl.-Inform. [M.S. in Computer Science] from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Davis.

His research interests are the development of novel scientific visualization techniques and new methods of human-computer interaction in immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, with the overarching goal of making visualization and visual analysis an integral part of the scientific process. He has been researching VR at IDAV since 1998, and has been applying VR methods to molecular biology and nanotechnology since 2002, mainly in collaboration with UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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