About the Technology

The SPLINT 3D Visualisation Theatre

The SPLINT bid funded the installation of a 3D visualisation theatre within the Sir Clive Granger Building at the University of Nottingham. The facility enables projection of a stereo image across a 5m x 2.5m screen. Up to 35 viewers wearing polarised glasses can experience the 3D virtual world on screen. The setup is joystick/joypad enabled so that a user in the room can control the viewpoint and viewing direction, and interact with the screen environment. The setup also has a facility to link up with mobile devices within the lab, via bluetooth, in order to present location based information relating to the main screen on PDAs, tablets or laptops. This can also be used as a 'virtual data logger' to record information about places visited in the 3D virtual world.

The virtual environments currently under development at Nottingham are the field sites used by the taught postgraduate and undergraduate students. These are the University of Nottingham campus, as an example of an urban environment, and the Newlands Valley in the Lake District, as an example of a rural environment.

The visualisation theatre will be used for various purposes within SPLINT:

• for pre-field trip orientation exercises,
• as a test bed for the location based m-learning applications currently under development,
• to present data gathered during the field trip back to the students in a visual and location-based way.
• to visualise in 3D building models created by students in their broader context (Visualisation Module [more])
• to explore remote environments
• to explore scenarios involving visual impact on the landscape (Fundamentals of GIS Module [more])

Technical Aspects of the Theatre

The SPLINT theatre is powered by a distributed rendering cluster of 5 PCs. 4 PCs render the realtime VR images to the 4 projectors mounted on the theatre ceiling, and one controls the warping and blending of the projector images. The projectors project through orthogonal polarised lenses onto a silver coated screen. The viewers wear orthogonally polarised glasses which allow them to see a different view of the VR world in each eye. The overall effect is to produce a fullscreen view for each of the viewers' eyes, allowing them to perceive a 3D version of the scene.

The scene itself is created using software developed for the simulation of aircraft flights. Multigen Vega [more], when combined with Bionatics Blueberry [more] allows the creation of highly detailed VR landscapes with vegetation, buildings, water and terrain. The software works by using multiple levels of detail within the models and their accompanying textures, and only loading the highest detail versions of aspects closest to the viewer. This allows the software to create a high degree of realism in the landscape without overloading the processors behind their production.

View a schematic diagram of the visualisation theatre [here]

Bluetooth Mapping Application

During the first year of student use of the VR system in the lab, it was found that they struggled with location and orientation awareness when immersed in the virtual world. SPLINT have therefore recently developed a mapping system which takes advantage of the lab's ability to emit a bluetooth position string. The string was adapted to also emit a directional component. A mapping application was then developed which runs on a bluetooth equipped laptop, hooked up to a 40" widescreen monitor. The mapping system displays the user's position and location on a scalable map. The map can be easily replaced with another image showing positions of specific relevant places or developments.

University of Nottingham development preview

Splint have been involved in the production of animations to enable previews of state-of-the-art facilities under construction at the University's Jubilee Campus. A preview flythrough of the new GRACE building was put together using architects models and shows the power of 3D visualisation for bringing the unbuilt to life. View the finished podcast [here].