Virtual Reality Environment Assisting Recovery from Stroke is a research collaboration between the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, UIC / EVL, and the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Led by RIC, Bioengineering Nikolay Stoykov project participants Daria Tsoupikova (EVL) and Randy Vick (Art Therapy, SAIC) are aiming to develop technology to facilitate therapeutic training of individuals with hand impairment following stroke. 

Investigation of the kinds of techniques and devices best suited to address varying degrees of impairment experienced by stroke survivors is explored. The current focus, following the first phase of Machines Assisting Recovery from Stroke (MARS) Development Project D1 is to evaluate a full reach-to-grasp training system. One approach will be to coordinate the pneumatic system with the arm robot and VRROOM, a unique, 3D large-workspace system, which uses a haptics (robotic forces) and graphics (visual display) interface, and developed by Drs. Patton (RIC) and Kenyon (UIC / EVL). 

EVL&rsquo;s Tsoupikova is contributing her expertise in virtual reality and interactive techniques by creating a novel environment inspired by the tale Alice in Wonderland, whereby the virtual host / therapist (March Hare) directs the guest / patient to perform tasks requiring repetitive grasp-and-release and individuated finger movements in the course of interacting with the numerous animated objects in the scene.

Subject using instrumentation developed to aid stroke impairment

Virtual Reality Environment Assisting Recovery from Stroke

The Hands-on Automated Nursing Data System (HANDS) is a standardized plan of care method in which the patient&rsquo;s plan is updated at every nurse hand-off allowing the interdisciplinary team to track the story about care and progress toward desired outcomes in a standardized format across time and units. 

EVL is collaborating with UIC&rsquo;s College of Nursing and College of Engineering on the visual component of the HANDS system. Current goals include: 
<ul>
<li>Improving the original HANDS user interface for more potential users such as doctors and therapists</li>
<li>investigating and understanding the needs of prospective users, and adding additional functionality to HANDS to address the needs of those users</li>
<li>Adding visualization to HANDS existing reports in an effort to empower current and future users to do more data exploration and visual analytics</li>
</ul>

HANDS Workload Report screen shot

Hands-on Automated Nursing Data System (HANDS)

STCI: OptIPlanet Cyber-Mashup: Persistent Visualization and Collaboration Services for Global Cyber Infrastructure 

The goal of this project is to accelerate the growth of a burgeoning community of international institutions that have adopted OptIPortals - ultra-resolution visualization display instruments interconnected by high-speed networks. 

OptIPortals have been identified in recent DOE and NSF reports as a crucial cyberinfrastructure technology for facilitating large-scale data visualization and collaboration in science and engineering. This project will develop a collection of new community-requested capabilities for the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) - the fundamental software that drives OptIPortals. Furthermore this project will establish a persistent and expandable collaboration service to facilitate distance collaborations between organizations that have adopted OptIPortals. 

Transformative Intellectual Merit 
Coping with complexity and scale in data is a problem that spans all of e-science. The Internet now provides unprecedented access to data, and that will continue to grow exponentially. NSF&rsquo;s many cyberinfrastructure initiatives are amassing terabytes to petabytes of data, and will soon reach exabytes. 

Over the past five years, we have witnessed a trend toward the use of ultra-resolution displays and environments as &ldquo;lenses&rdquo; for observing data amassed in these cyberinfrastructure repositories. To the scientists that have built them, these displays are their new &ldquo;microscopes&rdquo; and &ldquo;telescopes&rdquo;. Our work in OptIPortals and SAGE enables scientific users to connect visualization pipelines running on supercomputers, data storage systems and/or instruments (e.g., high-definition cameras) to form a giant Cyber-Mashup on these ultra-high-resolution environments. Cyber-Mashups created on OptIPortals are a future-thinking, transformative approach to making large-scale data visualization, exploration and collaboration more scalable, and therefore affordable, for scientists and engineers to use NSF cyberinfrastructure. 

Transformative Broader Impact 
SAGE and OptIPortals are transformative technologies that demonstrate the United States&rsquo; leadership in cyberinfrastructure research. Already over 40 top institutions around the world ranging from national laboratories and universities to private industry have invested millions of dollars to install OptIPortals and high speed networking to enable them to become part of the OptIPlanet Collaboratory. 

The first adopters of OptIPortals have used them in disciplines such as: geoscience, homeland security, bioscience, cosmology, atmospheric science, chemistry, computer science, medical education and art. We anticipate that the robust and persistent technologies that will be developed and deployed in this project will enable this technology to reach out to an even larger community of scientists and students, and transform the way they make discoveries using large-scale data using cyberinfrastructure.

PIs Andy Johnson &amp; Jason Leigh Using One of EVL&rsquo;s OptiPortals

OptIPlanet Cyber-Mashup

The Next-Generation CAVE Virtual Environment, or NG-CAVE, is a scientific instrument that enables researchers to visualize data in a fully immersive 3D stereoscopic environment; it serves as the lense of a &ldquo;telescope&rdquo; or &ldquo;microscope,&rdquo; enabling them to see their e-science datasets that reside in cyberspace. Its development is being funded by the National Science Foundation&rsquo;s Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program, award # CNS-0959053, for the period May 1, 2010 - April 30, 2013. 

Upon completion, the NG-CAVE will be the world&rsquo;s first flat-panel-based, high-resolution CAVE - i.e., Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, which the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) built and successfully commercialized in the 1990s. The original CAVE was a 10x10x10-foot room within a room, with a resolution of 4 Megapixels and a cost of about $1M. The NG-CAVE provides potentially 10 times the stereo resolution at half the cost. This is achieved by using the latest near-seamless, flat-panel, passive-stereo, LCD technology to create a multi-person collaborative space. 

The NG-CAVE benefits large-scale collaboratories of discipline scientists in need of advanced cyberinfrastructure. Today, all science is e-science: computers capture, filter, analyze and visualize data from instruments and simulations. EVL has longstanding partnerships with a number of leading scientific research and education organizations - computer-science communities, domain-science communities, government laboratories, museums, and corporate research - who have built many of its prior visualization systems, and have provided EVL with feedback on new requirements based on their evolving scientific needs. EVL truly believes it can transform their workflows by providing them with new and more intuitive ways of interacting with their data. 

In addition, NG-CAVE benefits computer scientists, enabling them to study a wide range of new problems at the intersection of human-computer interaction, virtual reality, computer graphics, high-performance computing, high-speed networking, and computer-supported cooperative work, with the goal of providing better ways to help knowledge workers manage scale and complexity in their research. 

This MRI enables EVL to continue to provide state-of-the-art visualization instrumentation to research scientists and educational opportunities that enhance UIC graduate and undergraduate education. EVL&rsquo;s MRI-funded instruments are developed by its faculty, staff and students, and used by approximately 11 EVL-affiliated UIC departments in Computer Science, Geoscience, Medicine, Communications, Education, and Art. These instruments enable graduate students to conduct research toward their degrees, and attract and inspire undergraduates to pursue graduate degrees. Additionally, EVL has engaged scores of children through its outreach efforts with the public schools and museums.

Prototype Design of the NG-CAVE

Next-Generation CAVE

CAVE2&trade;, the next-generation large-scale virtual-reality environment, is a hybrid system that combines the benefits of both scalable-resolution display walls and virtual-reality systems to create a seamless 2D / 3D environment that supports both information-rich analysis as well as virtual-reality simulation exploration at a resolution matching human visual acuity. 

CAVE2 creates new opportunities for users to collaborate using both 2D and 3D. Today, all science is e-science: computers capture, filter, analyze and visualize data from instruments and simulations. CAVE2 serves as the lens of a virtual &ldquo;telescope&rdquo; or &ldquo;microscope&rdquo; enabling users to simultaneously see and analyze one or more e-science datasets that reside in cyberspace. 

CAVE2 benefits large-scale collaboratories of discipline scientists in need of advanced cyberinfrastructure, providing them with new and more intuitive ways of interacting with their data. In addition, CAVE2 benefits computer scientists interested in providing knowledge workers with better ways to manage the scale and complexity of their data, by enabling them to study a wide range of new problems at the intersection of human-computer interaction, virtual reality, computer graphics, high-performance computing, high-speed networking, and computer-supported cooperative work. 

CAVE2 was developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a renowned interdisciplinary research laboratory that pioneered the development of the <a href='http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=161'>CAVE</a> virtual-reality system (1992) and the <a href='http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=273'>OptIPortal</a> scalable-resolution display wall (2004-present). These displays, deployed to hundreds of research, industrial and educational researchers and developers worldwide, enable users to see and navigate through complex datasets. 

Classic CAVEs are virtual-reality rooms with stereoscopic 3D computer graphics rear-projected onto the walls and down-projected onto the floor. OptIPortals are tiled display walls. Today, both are powered by computer clusters connected to high-speed networks to enable users to better cope with information-intensive tasks. The CAVE immerses people into worlds too large, too small, too dangerous, too remote, or too complex to be viewed otherwise. The OptIPortal creates a virtual &ldquo;project room&rdquo; in which people can display very-large images and/or simultaneously juxtapose more information, and better spatially organize, see and infer relationships among the data. The CAVE2 merges the major benefits of the CAVE and OptIPortal into a single unified environment. 

CAVE2 is programmable using a number of application programming interfaces. While some are virtual-reality only, it is EVL&rsquo;s <a href='http://www.sagecommons.org'>SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment)</a>, that enables CAVE2&rsquo;s huge wall to be partitioned into &ldquo;windows&rdquo; - enabling one or many 2D and 3D windows of information to simultaneously be displayed. 

CAVE2 is approximately 24 feet in diameter and 8 feet tall, and consists of 72 near-seamless passive stereo off-axis-optimized 3D LCD panels, a 36-node high-performance computer cluster, a 20-speaker surround audio system, a 10-camera optical tracking system and a 100-Gigabit/second connection to the outside world. CAVE2 provides users with a 320-degree panoramic environment for displaying information at 37 Megapixels in 3D or 74 Megapixels in 2D with a horizontal visual acuity of 20/20 - almost 10 times the 3D resolution of the original CAVE. 

The development of CAVE2, also referred to as the Next-Generation CAVE (NG-CAVE), has been funded by the National Science Foundation&rsquo;s Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program, award # CNS-0959053 and the Department of Energy, agreement # DE-SC005067. Grants such as these enable EVL to continue to provide state-of-the-art visualization instrumentation to research scientists and educational opportunities to UIC students. EVL&rsquo;s visualization and virtual-reality instruments are developed by its faculty, staff and students, and used by approximately 11 EVL-affiliated UIC departments in Computer Science, Geoscience, Medicine, Communications, Education, and Art. These instruments enable graduate students to conduct research toward their degrees, and attract and inspire undergraduates to pursue graduate degrees. Additionally, EVL has engaged scores of children through its outreach efforts with the public schools and museums. 

CAVE2 debuted October 2012. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/evltube/search?query=cave2">Videos showcasing CAVE2 applications.</a> 

CAVE2 is a trademark of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

Exploring a model of the Starship Enterprise in EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2

CAVE2: Next-Generation Virtual-Reality and Visualization Hybrid Environment for Immersive Simulation and Information Analysis

While many visualization tools exist that offer sophisticated functions for charting complex data, they still expect users to possess a high degree of expertise in wielding the tools to create an effective visualization. Articulate is a semi-automated visual analytic system that is guided by a conversational user interface to allow users to verbally describe and then manipulate what they want to see. Natural language processing and machine learning methods are used to translate the imprecise sentences into explicit expressions, and then a heuristic graph generation algorithm is applied to create a suitable visualization. The goal is to relieve the user of the burden of having to learn a complex user-interface in order to craft a visualization.

Research - 2009

Virtual Reality Environment Assisting Recovery from Stroke

Hands-on Automated Nursing Data System (HANDS)

OptIPlanet Cyber-Mashup

Next-Generation CAVE

CAVE2: Next-Generation Virtual-Reality and Visualization Hybrid Environment for Immersive Simulation and Information Analysis

Articulate: a Semi-automated System for Translating Natural Language Queries into Meaningful Visualizations

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