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CAVE2 made it to the cover of Nature Medicine! In the picture, David Barnes (Monash University) is using EVL's Omegalib software to explore the beautiful brain connectome dataset by Olusola Ajilore (UIC). Read the full article here: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v20/n3/full/nm0314-228.html

Omegalib version 4.3 is a minor release that introduces shader-based widget rendering in omegaToolkit, and several other minor fixes and improvements. Major Changes omegaToolkit Improved Container python API Widgets now render through shader (mostly done to simplify alpha modulation but could have other uses in the future) Fixed Mouse ButtonUp event flags ( 4.3.1 ) Container clipping support Omegalib is also running on a brand new CAVE2 installation on the other side of the world! Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, recently finished assembling their CAVE2 system in their new state-of-the art New Horizons facility. We are looking forward to some awesome collaboration possibilities with our new friends from Monash! The Monash CAVE2 running the omegalib Connectome Demo. For more information see  This Article

This version greatly improves the speed of user-centered stereo tracking in cluster installations. The Equalizer/omegalib interface and rendering code has also been simplified. Porthole is now included as a separate module. The flipbookPlayer module has also been moved from the apps repository to the omegalib core repository. To support multi-view interaction, omegalib 4.2 also introduces ray-based wand event filtering: multiple applications can be controlled using the same wand device. Only the application currently pointed at receives input. Multi-view interaction is implemented in a new module (**mvi**). breaking change:  the  overridePanopticStereo  function has been removed due to its confusing name. The same function can now be controlled by doing  getDisplayConfig.panopticStereoEnabled = True / False Major Changes omega removed obsolete Equalizer statistics output added New statistics display in Console overlay Render passes get sorted by priori...

An multiview osg+vtk omegalib 4.1 application has been used to analyse sonar data collected during the NASA ENDURANCE exploration of Lake Bonney, Antarctica. This version adds experimental support for the Oculus Rift head mounted display through a custom omegalib module, and introduces major improvements to mission control client-to-client communication support. Major Changes omega death switch timeout automatically kills stuck slave instances getButtonSetting  python function event dispatching enable / disable functions tile show/hide commands improved bounding box calculation SceneNode.setChildrenVisible Python event callbacks process events as modules with NORMAL priority level, instead of processing them after all modules (i.e. below Lowest priority). This allows python event callbacks to mark events as processed before they are passed to lower-priority modules. python  MissionControlClient  class. Other improvements to mission control support ...

This is the first release in the omegalib 4 series. This series driving feature is the support for multi-instance / multi-view immersive applications. Notes Sound API changes  All sound paths in applications need to switch to use relative paths.  This version adds auto-update support for windows. The omegalib windows binaries are pulled from  https://github.com/febret/omegalib-windows Major Changes omega Added  Color  from omicron. Added  Color.isValidColor Added per-tile runtime camera controls:  isHostInTileSection ,  setTileCamera . pointerSize  config option Automatic multi-instance port adjustment for NetService on the  -I  multi-instance switch, the port pool can be left unspecified. It will be set to 100 by default. 4.0.2 : omegalib can built using an external omicron installation 4.0.2 : python interpreter now does module lookups in the current script directory. 4.0.2 : fixed performance issue with SceneNo...

A Video Feature on CAVE2 by CDW EDTECH. Pretty catchy video!

For the final project in the UIC Spring 2013 Parallel Processing Class, I worked with a classmate to optimize our current implementation of a sonar beam tracer used for  The NASA ENDURANCE Project . The beam tracer is used to process the raw data collected by the ENDURANCE AUV in Lake Bonney, Antarctica, and correct sound beam paths using information about the water chemistry. The data is clustered and noise filtered to generate a final 3D Point cloud that can be visualized in our CAVE2 system. The ENDURANCE Sonar data in CAVE2. Photo(c) Lance Long. A lot of corrections and adjustments need to be applied to this data before the final results are acceptable. Some of the corrections derive from the sound speed estimation through the water column, AUV navigation corrections, water level changes and noise filtering thresholds. All this parameters influence the final result, and ideally researchers can tweak them and see the result of their actions in real time. Given the siz...

When running your omegalib scripts in a cluster environment, you may need to execute some operation only on a specific node. That’s what the   isMaster() and  getHostname() functions are for. Sometimes, after doing some node-specific work (especially on the master node) you want to notify all the other nodes you are done. A typical scenario is accessing some asset on the network and creating a copy on the local cache in the shared filesystem. As an example asset we’ll consider the canonical cute kitty picture.  You want the master node to perform the actual transfer, and notify all the other nodes of transfer completion, without blocking them. The nodes can then spam the displays with thousands of kitty-textured cubes (or spheres or cylinders. imagination is your limit). The omegalib C++ API supported this for a while. In omegalib 3.7 the function is now available to python applications as well, through the broadcastCommand() call. BroadcastCommand accepts a pyt...

Full version of this release is 3.6.3. Download it here , or get it from svn here:  http://omegalib.googlecode.com/svn/tags/v.3.6.3/ Big list of changes for this release: general moved Porthole code from omega to omegaToolkit ( 3.6.1 ) additional improvements and fixes to runtime application switching. ( 3.6.3 ) added modules directory for modules that are shipped as part of omegalib but are not part of the core libraries. Modules also provide a good source of examples on how to extend omegalib. ( 3.6.3 ) fbx sdk packages are downloaded on demand from omegalib website instead of being part of the repository. ( 3.6.4 ) python and FreeImage ? fbx sdk packages are downloaded on demand from omegalib website instead of being part of the repository. omicron Major improvements for SuperCollider sound API, thanks to Arthur Nishimoto and JD Pirtle orun control of application start command omega Python interpreter adds data root to module seearch path A few...

Mechdyne Corporation announced that it has licensed the CAVE2™ hybrid reality environment developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois at Chicago. The licensing agreement was signed in January of 2013, and continues the strong working relationship that began in 1994 when Mechdyne licensed the EVL-designed original CAVE™ technology.

"There are Paleolithic and Mesolithic caves tucked away in many corners of the globe. There also are many CAVEs — cave automatic virtual environments — found in ­Austria, Japan and cities throughout the United States. But the very first — and trademarked — CAVE was built at the University of Illinois at Chicago and demonstrated in 1992. Today, UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory invites researchers, artists, students and other stakeholders to step into CAVE2 — a virtual reality environment unlike any other." Read the Full EDTECH Article Here

"Take a walk through a human  brain ? Fly over the surface of Mars? Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago are pushing science fiction closer to reality with a wraparound virtual world where a researcher wearing 3D glasses can do all that and more" Read Full Article Here CAVE2 got a nice amount of press coverage lately. Through open house days and other demos we already had hundred of visitors experiencing the system. It is great so see so many people excited about what we do in EVL!

When designing CAVE2, one of the first questions the team had to answer was: how is it going to look like? Very different form factors were taken into consideration, each with advantages and disadvantages. One big favorite (and final winner) was the cylinder. Building a VR system using a purely cylindrical form factor was desirable for many reasons. We could get good immersion and peripheral vision levels, a big active enclosed space, simplify  assembly, and get a nice, seamless aesthetic design. A big problem we had to solve with this design was limiting crosstalk levels on our passive stereo displays. When a user stands much above or below the display center, the polarization overlay will not match the correct display pixels anymore. The result is: you see ghosts. Well, ok, not really. But some of the light targeted for the left eye goes to the right eye, and vice versa, resulting in a blurry stereo image. We measured ghost levels on our test setups and concluded they were very ...

To interact with our CAVE2 system, we are implementing well known techniques like classic wand devices, but we are also experimenting with less traditional ideas. For instance, we successfully prototyped an intuitive object manipulation interface called CAVESphere, based on a plexiglass sphere with embedded tracking markers. The sphere also contains a camera and microphone, which we can use to detect finger taps on the sphere surface, providing simple touch input. Photo credit Lance Long.

What happens when a team of neurosurgeons, university professors, architects, students and engineers stands in front of an 8-foot-high theater screen with a 320-degree, immersive, 3-D view of their data? Cutting-edge science happens, and some are astonished by what is revealed. A team of neurosurgeons from the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) recently stepped into CAVE2--a next-generation, large-scale, virtual environment--to solve a vexing problem that presented itself in the arteries of the brain of a real patient. The method they used could someday benefit hundreds of thousands of Americans who fall victim to brain aneurysms and strokes, the third leading cause of death in the United States. "We were flabbergasted," said Andreas Linninger, professor of bioengineering and lead researcher of a project that measures and models blood flow in the brains of patients with stroke. For years, Linninger and neurosurgeons had painstakingly use...

Omegalib 3.1 improves on version 3.0 introducing a few new features and improvements (sound, python API, porthole, configurability), and is the first version since the dark ages of the project that offers a prepackaged binary version for windows. Major Changes omega big improvements on sound support improved configuration, tile configuration is now much more flexible and allows eterogeneous geometries and stereo modes (linux) control-C kills application even on cluster systems omegalib builds on OSX runtime stereo switch orun -D  option lets user switch application data directory instead of system data directory omegaToolkit 3d ui control supported in python, plus additional ui interaction improvements cyclops simplified shader system added emissive texture support added bump effect shader improved animation support omegaVtk support for per-actor visibility omegaOsg optional support for Inventor / VRML files The omegalib brain 2 application run...