Application of Tele-Immersion in Wide Area Networks
Responsible: Siegfried Raasch
Project type: ​BMBF project
Project supervision: Stephan Olbrich (RRZN), Hans-Christian Hege (ZIB)
Duration: 01/01/2001 - 31/12/2002

The goal of this project is to realize a tele-immersive, multi-modal virtual reality environment, which provides three-dimensional, collaborative presentation, exploration and discussion capabilities on the basis of 3D representations. Extensions for steering numerical simulations shall lead to a "Virtual Laboratory" scenario, which could be applied in the context of high performance computing, serving for several purposes, such as better understanding of complex, dynamic relationships, getting important design parameters of expensive or dangerous installations, or developing advanced educational technologies.

Several partners are involved in this project in charge of the "Regionales Rechenzentrum für Niedersachsen" (​RRZN) and the "Konrad-Zuse Zentrum für Informationstechnik" in Berlin (​ZIB). Our special goal is the stereoscopic visualization of huge time-dependent data on a local workstation, which have been created on a remote massively parallel computer (in our case by the LES model PALM). In principle, state-of-the-art front-end graphic workstations and software are unable to handle such huge data sets (single scalar arrays may be as big as several Gigabyte). Our idea is to apply the postprocessing of the raw data into geometric 3D scenes (polygons, lines, or points) as part of the MPI-based parallel simulation. Only the geometric scenes are then transferred in a specially designed binary format to the local graphic workstation and visualized with the WEB-browser plugin ​DocShow-VR, developed at the RRZN.