The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) is an interdisciplinary graduate research laboratory that combines art and computer science, specializing in advanced visualization and networking technologies.

The laboratory is a joint effort of UIC's College of Engineering and The School of Art & Design representing the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the country, offering graduate degrees in electronic visualization (MFA, MS, PhD).

EVL maintains a distinguished publication record, with students and faculty publishing in major journals and conferences worldwide.

Funded research projects include: distributed computing/visualization, collaborative software, the development of viable, scalable, deployable stereo displays and management of next-generation advanced networking initiatives.

In 1992, EVL invented the CAVE™ virtual reality theater, followed by the ImmersaDesk™ in 1995, and the PARIS™ system (collaborative augmented reality environment with haptic feedback) in 1998. These display environments are widely used globally for scientific and medical discovery, art exhibition and industrial prototyping.

A natural progression was to develop smaller, low-cost alternatives to earlier active stereo systems, including the GeoWall™, a passive stereo projection system, and Varrier™, a scalable, tiled, high-resolution autostereo display.

EVL has also been designing visualization and networking instruments to support collaboration among co-located and remote experts requiring interactive ultra-high-resolution imagery; LambdaVision™, a 100Mpixel tiled-display, designed to support various disciplines including earth science research, and training exercises in disaster response and crisis management and LambdaTable™, a tiled LCD tabletop display that supports interactive group-based visualization of ultra-high-resolution data.

Concurrent with EVL's research and development of visualization technologies has been the advancement of tools and techniques for collaborative work over high-speed, experimental networks. From earlier tele-immersion experiments supported by Quanta and CAVERNsoft software toolkits, to SAGE: Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment, EVL has collaborated with application scientists to develop tools that facilitate visualization and shared applications over advanced optical networks.

A current research emphasis is upon the advancement of SAGE, a graphics streaming architecture for supporting collaborative scientific visualization environments from the desktop to ultra-high resolution tiled displays, and Visualcasting, a Sage extension that allows streaming to multiple sites simultaneously, both national and global. This work addresses the need to support heterogeneity and scalability by decoupling graphics rendering from graphics display while utilizing ultra-high-bandwidth networking.

Since 2001, EVL, along with collaborators Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory, has engineered and managed the StarLight℠, a 1GigE and 10GigE switch/router facility for high-performance access to participating networks, and a true optical switching facility for wavelengths. StarLight℠ ties together metropolitan, regional, national and international advanced research networks at a single point in the Midwest bringing together the international academic and commercial communities to create a proving ground in support of grid-intensive e-Science applications, network performance measurement and analysis, and computing and networking technology evaluations.

In cooperation with US and European national research and education networks, TransLight/StarLight℠ - also managed by EVL and its partners SURFnet, Argonne and Northwestern - is implementing a strategy to best serve established production science, including usage by those scientists, engineers and educators who have persistent large-flow, real-time, and other advanced application requirements. Its mission is to provide multi-gigabit links and supporting infrastructure to interconnect US and European research & education networks, as well as to supplement the available bandwidth that is being provided by other countries.

Our collaborative work on TransLight/StarLight℠ is a single project example of the many partnerships EVL maintains with other academic and research institutions to manage, build, and optimally utilize optical networks.

EVL receives major funding from the National Science Foundation, as well as through the National Institutes of Health, the State of Illinois, the Office of Naval Research on behalf of the Technology Research, Education, and Commercialization Center (TRECC), and Pacific Interface on behalf of NTT Optical Network Systems Laboratory in Japan.