A clear vision: getting immersed in, oh, so many ways and for, oh, so many reasons.(Visualization)

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At least one reason we make hand gestures when we talk is to help people see what we mean. Visualization is a critical part of understanding. On the computer. 3D visualization opens up the door to collaboration and decision-making. Not many people make decisions based on hand waving.

The field of visualization and, especially, immersive visualization is utterly booming, with changes happening in every area of the industry, as designers and scientists push the technology, for greater realism, while hardware architectures rise to the challenge. Systems are being built on what can only be called a grand scale. For instance, several visualization centers have been built that take advantage of Sony's 4K projectors for super high resolutions and crazy realism--or, at least, It used to be crazy; now it's just expensive.

What's changing right in front of our eyes is the range of tools available for this purpose. A lot of the high-end visualization systems we have now came from work done in the 1980s by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Tom DeFanti, and Dan San din at the University of Illinois, Chicago; where the first CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) was built. A CAVE can have three, four, five, or six walls, and stereoscopic views to give users the illusion of immersion.

Today's systems, though, have evolved to suit a given situation. There are still CAVEs, and their numbers are growing, but there are also power walls and high-end workstations with 3D glasses, or auto-stereoscopic screens that don't require glasses, "all providing people with a clear view into the abstract. Whatever the medium, the demand is for as much reality as possible--and in real time.

Europe Versus the US

Over the past decade or so, European development in 3D visualization has been on the rise. Jeroen Snepvangers of RTT (Realtime Technology), with headquarters in both Europe and the US, has seen both sides of the visualization/realism coin. He contends that the use of 3D visualization has increased much more in Europe than it has in the US, and a contributing factor may be a difference in attitude. Snepvangers heads RTT's operations in the US, where, he says, the company has found considerably more interest in the creation of photorealistic images. In Europe, however, RTT is being asked to build visualization centers. "Everyone has to have a CAVE," he adds.