MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT SPRING 2000 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

A newsletter for alumni, students, and friends of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

New eMedia Center is for Advanced Computer Visualizations

Professor Rajit Gadh has set up a new facility called the eMedia Center that will offer access and expertise about advanced computer visualization systems. Professor Gadh says that it "will work with students and faculty interested in industry-focused projects in Internet-based collaboration (engineering and business), Internet-based design and graphics."

The center, soon to be housed in room 1019 of the Engineering Research Building, has been awarded a grant from the Hewlett Packard Company of a large (5 foot by 18 foot) panoramic screen "HP Visualize Center" along with six development workstations. This visualize center offers a compelling immersive display system for viewing objects, scenes, and environments. It is also well suited to the display and analysis of multidimensional data from experiments and simulations. The viewable resolution of the display is high, 4,000 X 1,200 points, to allow detailed examination.

The installation is configured as a collaborative theater that can accommodate from two to twenty team members, and the theater can also connect to other advanced display systems on the network to build a distributed visual collaborative environment involving many more participants. The eMedia Center will promote use of the theater to present conceptual and analytical visualizations to student groups for local and distributed applications. Professor Gadh is the center director and Michael Redmond is the associate director. For more information, contact Redmond at 608/263-1584 or redmond@engr.wisc.edu.

SPRING 2000 Contents