We describe our work on the development and use of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) in support of very shallow water mine remediation, mission planning and rehearsal activities. Incorporating multiple data streams, the CVEs allow the user to view navigate and interact with data in a 3D environment, including graphical representations of bathymetry / topography, above-surface images, in-water objects (e.g. mines, bridges), and hydrographic characteristics (e.g. currents, water levels, temperature). Asynchronous collaborative capability allows users at many distributed sites to partake in a many-to-many session that takes place in a common virtual world. CAVE5D, a tool for immersive visualization of data to support oceanographic, meteorological and CFD studies, has been integrated with the VR application Virtual Director and the underlying collaborative architecture known as CAVERNsoft. CAVE5D provides visualization techniques to display multi-dimensional numerical data for atmospheric, oceanographic, and other similar models, including iso-surfaces, countour slices, volume visualization, wind / trajectory vectors, and various image projection formats. Virtual Director is a software framework that enables real-time VR data exploration, shared camera choreography between distributed sites, and animation creation capability. CAVERNsoft supports persitent CVEs for collaborative visualizations that involve supercomputers, massive data stores and the integration of additional “real-time” observations collected by autonomous sensors or swimmer scouts.

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Wheless, G., Lascara, C., Cox, D., Patterson, R., Levy, S., Johnson, A., Leigh, J., Kapoor, A., The Use of Collaborative Virtual Environments in the Mine Countermeasures Mission, Proceedings of SPIE’s 13th Annual International Symposium on Aerospace / Defense Sensing, Simulation, and Controls, Orlando, FL, April 5th, 1999.