IU’s Advanced Visualization Lab develops, licenses, and deploys John-e-Box stereo display systems

Indianapolis, IN—Wednesday, October 29, 2003—Visualization and virtual reality technologies are having broad and significant impacts across Indiana University. Many of the same basic technologies that have brought about revolutions in the gaming, entertainment, and home theater industries are being harnessed in innovative ways to bring about revolutions in Indiana University’s missions in research, education, and creative activity. The John-e-Box, developed at IU and recently licensed and commercialized, is one significant and innovative realization of these trends.

The John-e-Box is a portable, large-format, passive stereo display system developed in Indiana University’s Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL). It capitalizes on recent advances in commodity-grade components including small, bright, digital projectors; powerful PC processors and graphics cards; and flexible, open source software tools. The John-e-Box is a key component of ongoing plans to deliver the capabilities of advanced visualization displays directly into the labs, classrooms, and studios of the University’s researchers, educators, and artists, creating a technological bridge to high-end display installations like the CAVE.

“The John-e-Box represents significant steps forward in usability, maintainability, and affordability and is an ideal technology for bringing advanced display capabilities to IU’s regional campuses,” said IU Associate Vice President for Research and Academic Computing and IUB Dean for Information Technology Dr. Bradley Wheeler.

At Indiana University, visualization and virtual reality technologies are used to help scientists and researchers analyze complex data sets and collaborate with colleagues, to help students experience historical spaces and understand important scientific phenomena, and to help artists and designers communicate their innovative concepts and creative experiences.

The increasing power, affordability, and usability of these systems allows technology groups to deploy these systems directly into labs and classrooms where they can have maximum impact and can be fully integrated with the University’s outstanding IT infrastructure and resources for networking, computing, storage, and telecommunications.

“We feel that the John-e-Box represents not only an effective merger of computing technologies, but also an effective merger of the talents, efforts, and resources of groups within the University and the State of Indiana,” said Dr. Eric Wernert, senior scientist and manager of the Advanced Visualization Lab. The John-e-Box was developed by John N. Huffman of the AVL, in conjunction with Wernert and Dr. John C. Huffman of IUB’s Chemistry Department. The project was made possible through funding from the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and through technical support from the Chemistry Department at IU Bloomington. The John-e-Box has been licensed to and commercialized by CAE-net, an Indianapolis-based company with interests in computer-aided design, collaborative engineering, and video streaming for higher education and distributed learning. Licensing was made possible with help from the IU’s Advanced Research and Technology Institute (ARTI).

An initial deployment of eight systems is underway on the IUB, IUPUI, and IU Northwest campuses as part of the Analysis and Visualization of Instrument-Driven Data (AVIDD) system, funded through an NSF/MRI grant involving faculty, scientific researchers and staff from across the University.

The John-e-Box is just one of a number of key hardware and software technologies in the areas of visualization, virtual reality, advanced graphics and visual collaboration that the AVL is developing, refining, or deploying in its mission to support the research, education, and creative activities of
Indiana University.

About the Advanced Visualization Lab

The Advanced Visualization Lab is a unit of the Research and Academic
Computing division of University Information Technology Services at Indiana
University with laboratories at IU Bloomington and Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. To learn more about the AVL and its collaborators and ongoing projects, please visit:

http://www.avl.iu.edu/

Contact:
Julie Wernert
Office of the Vice President for Information Technology & CIO
Indiana University
(812) 856-3972
jwernert@indiana.edu

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