Visualization Design Institute

Last thursday my classmates visited the Sheridan Visualization Design Institute. Unfortunately, I missed this field trip because I was playing with my band ohbijou at the Pop Montreal International Music Festival. However, the rock star life has not excused me from my duties as a student, so below is a summary of my research on the topics of immersive theatres where multiple users control the outcomes, and on Face Recognition Technology.

At the Visualization Design Institute, one of the projects they have developed is the Collision Investigation: skid marks which is a series of animations and simulations designed for police officers to practice determining the speed of a vehicle based on four different kinds of skid marks.

Science museums around the world are embracing immersion theatres as an interactive means of teaching science. One example is at the Miami Science Museum where students learn about human biology using robots to touch screens and compete to save their team members through a series virus fighting games.

One of the first immersion theatres was developed in the electronic visualization library at the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1992. It is known as CAVE (cave automatic visual environment) and uses several cameras pointed at some or all of the walls of a cube. The user wears special glasses to see the 3D images projected on the walls and their movements are tracked by a computer which adjusts the projected images accordingly. Even the audio is projected from speakers aligned in different directions to generate a total 3D experience.

Immersion technology is often used to create sports simulation games, in which multiple users can compete against one another and a virtual ball responds to their movements. Some of these interactive environments are so user friendly, even animals can use them!

Looking towards the future, another application being researched at the Visualization Design Institute is the Facial Animation Communication Engine. It is a real-time tracking system which extracts a set of facial animation control parameters from video input of a human face. This application could be extremely useful for security purposes, but raises the issues of privacy, and mistaken identities. It would need to be almost error proof in order to hold any value in terms of the law. However, it is already in use at XID technologies in Singapore, controlling access for 6,000 blue-collar workers, in and out of the building, 24/7. I guess no one there can send in a substitute to do their day’s work for them!