Virtual devices: tools to remotely develop virtual environments

摘要

Virtual environments as an aid for scientific discovery are becoming a topic of research for many visualization efforts. Virtual environments provide greater immersion into the world or environment of scientific data, thereby enhancing the researcher's perception of its features and forms. However, access to laboratories with the appropriate hardware for providing the immersive environments is currently limited. To make the best use of limited lab time a scientist will want to spend as much of it as possible actually looking at the data, and not debugging the virtual world source code. In an effort to get the scientist close to achieving this goal, we have developed software to emulate a suite of standard virtual environment hardware devices. Emulated hardware is designed such that it is indistinguishable to the application software. Communications with the `virtual devices' is via a serial port using the same protocol as the physical devices. Some `virtual devices' have already been written. We are now making efforts to have virtual environment programmers use them to design and test applications without using much of the increasingly precious time in the NCSA Virtual Reality Laboratory.