Sometimes scientists would like to stick their heads into interesting parts of their data sets and look around, but they are hampered by the “outsidelooking- in” aspect of workstation-based visualization. At the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, we are attempting to break some of the visualization barriers with a distributed computing and visualization environment developed using the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) virtual reality theater. In particular, we’re trying to provide physicists and astrophysicists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) a new vehicle for scientific discovery.

This paper describes The Cosmic Worm, a CAVE-based distributed computing and visualization package that enables NCSA scientists to examine astrophysics and relativity data in an interactive, immersive environment.