Next Generation Telecollaborative Environments

John van Rosendale, College of William and Mary

Abstract

The most productive way to hold a meeting is face-to-face across a
conference table.  Telephone, televideo, and the myriad other modalities
by which we share information are a pale substitute for face-to-face
meetings.  Teleimmersion is an emerging suite of technologies allowing
a person to be virtually in another location.  For example, a person
on the West Coast might be teleimmersed in a meeting physically in
Washington, D.C., and would see and hear the remote participants as if
they were sitting next to them.  The code word for this is "presence,"
the sensation of being some place, independent of whether that feeling
is based on reality or electronic legerdemain.

Current virtual reality environments are fraught with difficulties
poor resolution, induced motion sickness, and so on.  In particular,
the resolution and field of view in current head mounted displays is
so poor that the user meets the definition of "legally blind."  In this
talk, I will describe on-going graphics/visualization research projects
aimed at overcoming these issues, including a William and Mary project
aimed at producing a multi-person autostereo environment.  Applications
for such environments include collaborative scientific research, and
distributed meetings of experts for disaster response coordination.

Bio Sketch

John van Rosendale is Director of Computational Science at William
and Mary.  John received his PhD in Computer Science from University of
Illinois in 1981 and has done research on multigrid methods, parallel
algorithms and languages, computational fluid dynamics, and currently
focuses on interactive graphics and visualization.

John joined William and Mary in January 2005, after spending 10 years
as a program manager, first with the National Science Foundation,
then the US Department of Energy.  At NSF he was, among other things,
program manager for the Science and Technology Center in Computer
Graphics and Visualization.  Based in part on that experience he was
asked to lead a series of NSF/DOE workshops that led to the 1998 Report:
Data and Visualization Corridors, Report on the 1998 DVC Workshop Series
(Caltech report CACR-164).  This in turn led to formation of the DOE VIEWS
program, a $60M/year program funding in graphics research both within the
National Labs and academia.  Over the next several years, VIEWS funding
led to the Chromium scalable rendering package, CEI's Ensight Gold,
the first Nvidia drivers for Linux platforms, the 9MP IBM T221 monitor,
and a number of other milestones in graphics and visualization.