The research program of the Virtual Reality and Visualization Research Group focuses on three major topics:
- Collaboration in Multi-User Virtual Reality: Our innovative stereoscopic multiuser-display enables local and remote teams to work effectively on virtual 3D models. In this context, we design novel input devices and interaction technologies for group communication and collaboration on complex two- and three-dimensional tasks. Computer scientists and civil engineers will use our advanced infrastructure for collaborating on a »virtual construction site«.
- Large Model Visualization: Our work concentrates on the many scientific and technical challenges of an integrated out-of-core and real-time rendering system for extremely large volumetric data sets, images, terrains and laser scanning data. This system is the foundation for all our visualization work on various output devices ranging from tablets and desktops to high resolution display walls and distributed multiuser virtual reality systems.
- Visual Analytics for Big Data: We focus on new techniques for the interactive visual exploration of complex data sets in areas such as product marketing analysis, text analytics and large simulations. This work will particularly benefit from the multitouch support and the extremely high resolution of our tiled display wall.
The unique hardware infrastructure of the visualization lab allows us to perform trend-setting research on multi-user multi-display collaboration and advanced visualization techniques with fast and high bandwidth access to enormous computational resources.
Selected Projects
Collaboration in Multi-User Virtual Reality (Alexander Kulik, André Kunert, Stephan Beck, Bernd Fröhlich)
Immersive telepresence allows distributed groups of users to meet in a shared virtual 3D world. We will couple projection-based multi-user setups, each providing multiple users with perspectively correct stereoscopic images. At each site, the users and their local interaction space are continuously captured using a cluster of registered depth and color cameras. The captured 3D information is transferred to the respective other location, where the remote participants are virtually reconstructed in life-size. Local and remote users can jointly or independently explore virtual environments and virtually meet face-to-face for discussions.
Link: http://www.uni-weimar.de/de/medien/professuren/vr/research/multi-user-virtual-reality/
Virtual Construction Site (Andre Schollmeyer, Sebastian Thiele, Stephan Beck, Alexander Kulik, André Kunert, Bernd Fröhlich)
The continuous observation and interpretation of all processes on a construction site by means of sensors, cameras and 3D scanning would allow advanced monitoring of the actual progress. This three-dimensional digital information can be viewed locally or remotely and compared to the related CAD models and design data. New technologies and processes need to be for capturing, registering, transmitting, storing, accessing and presenting the huge amounts of generated information.
Link: http://www.uni-weimar.de/de/medien/professuren/vr/research/big-data-visualization/
Visual Analytics for Big Data (Patrick Riehmann, Henning Gründl, Martin Potthast, Matthias Hagen, Benno Stein, Bernd Fröhlich)
Our research interests concentrate on visual text analytics and the visualization of large time-dependent measurement and simulation datasets. The scalability and real-time capability of visualization techniques for such big data problems have been limited so far. To facilitate the exploration, analysis and presentation of big data, we will develop effective overview, navigation, selection and multi-focus techniques and combine them with other forms of visualization in a coordinated multi-view approach.
Link: http://www.uni-weimar.de/de/medien/professuren/vr/research/infovis/
Publications
Kunert, A., Kulik, A., Beck, S., Froehlich B. Photoportals: Shared References in Space and Time. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1388-1399, February 2014
Beck, S., Kunert, A., Kulik, A., Froehlich B. Immersive Group-to-Group Telepresence (Best Paper Award). IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 19(4):616-625, March 2013 (Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality 2013, Orlando, Florida).
Kulik A., Kunert A., Beck S., Reichel R., Blach R., Zink A., Froehlich B. C1x6: A Stereoscopic Six-User Display for Co-located Collaboration in Shared Virtual Environments. ACM Transactions on Graphics 30, 6 (Proceedings of the 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia Conference (SA '11)), Article 188 (December 2011), 12 pages.
Schollmeyer, A., Froehlich, B. Direct Isosurface Ray Casting of NURBS-based Isogeometric Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 20(9), 1227-1240 (2014)
Lux, C., Fröhlich, B. GPU-Based Ray Casting of Stacked Out-of-Core Height Fields. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Visual Computing, LNCS vol. 6938, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 269-280, October 2011.
Plate, J., Holtkaemper, T., Froehlich, B. A Flexible Multi-Volume Shader Framework for Arbitrarily Intersecting Multi-Resolution Datasets. Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Volume 13, Issue 6, pp. 1584-1591, 2007.
Riehmann, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B., Froehlich, B. Visual Assessment of Alleged Plagiarism Cases. COMPUTER GRAPHICS forum, Volume 34 (2015), Number 3, (special issue EuroVis 2015), Cagliari, Italy, May 2015
Riehmann, P., Gruendl, H., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M., Stein, B., Froehlich, B. WORDGRAPH: Keyword-in-Context Visualization for NETSPEAK's Wildcard Search. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, pp. 1411-1423, Sept. 2012
Riehmann, P., Opolka, J., Froehlich, B. The Product Explorer: Decision Making with Ease. In Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI), Capri, Italy, pp423-432, May 2012