Wonderland

`Oh, I've had such a curious dream!' said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, `It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it's getting late.' So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
from Alice in the Wonderland by Lewis Carrol

Wonderland is the advanced computer graphics laboratory founded in 1997 by CUT (now UPL), VRlab and HPC2N. Wonderland provides a creative environment for developers of the next generation of virtual reality (VR) applications and advanced visualizations of complex data sets. The laboratory is equipped with state-of-the-art hardware and software, including tools for developing and running VR and visualization applications.

Wonderland is located on floor 4 in the MIT-building, close to the department of Computing Science and HPC2N. Several Master-level students at the department of Computing Science are involved in projects which utlize the facilities of Wonderland. This ensures a steady flow of new and creative ideas, which mixed with interesting applications in different fields provide an R&D environment for the future.

See sample projects that use the facilities in Wonderland.

All other resources at HPC2N are also accessible from Wonderland.
 

Installed in Wonderland, the Computer Graphics laboratory at Umeå University, is hardware that enables students and researchers to visualize and explore their data and interact in Virtual Environments. The listing of hardware include computers, display equipment and interaction hardware.
 

SGI Onyx2 The SGI system at HPC2N is named alice.hpc2n.umu.se. Alice is a SGI Onyx2 with Infinite Reality graphics, and is the main computing facility for scientific visualization and VR applications. Alice is equipped with the following hardware:
  • 10 MIPS R-10000 (195 MHz),
  • 2 Gbyte of memory,
  • two fully equipped Infinite Reality graphics pipes with 64 Mbyte texture memory and 4 Raster Managers (320 Mbyte Frame buffer) per pipe,
  • two 24 inch SuperWide monitors.
SGI Octane A smaller machine is donald.hpc2n.umu.se, a SGI Octane MXI, but still very powerful for visualization applications. Donald is equipped as follows:
  • MXI graphics,
  • 4Mb texture memory,
  • 256Mb primary memory,
  • 195MHz R10000 processor.
SGI O2 The lab is also equipped with two smaller workstations, ideal for developing applications. The workstations, named dewey.hpc2n.umu.se and louie.hpc2n.umu.se, are SGI O2 equipped with:
  • 300Mhz R5200 processor,
  • 128Mb primary memory.
BARCO projector One of the graphics pipes on Alice is connected to a BARCO 1208s Projector:
  • max resolution: 2500x2000,
  • RGB bandwidth: 120MHz.
Virtual Research HMD The lab is also equipped with a Virtual Research VR8 HMD connected to one of the pipes on Alice.

Specification of the HMD:
  • resolution: 640x480 (VGA),
  • active matrix LCD,
  • field of view: 60 degrees diagonal,
  • audio: Sennheiser HD25 high performance headphones,
  • weight: 0.8kg.
Crystal Eyes The Crystal Eyes stereoglasses makes it possible to see 3D objects on a monitor as well as on the projector.  
Dextroscope The Dextroscope is a dextrous, reach-in, high resolution 3D environment developed by KRDL in Singapore. Together with the Fastrak trackersystem and the Crystal Eyes stereoglasses this enables the user to interact with virtual objects in an eye-hand coordinated way.

The Dextroscope is Very suitable for precision tasks.

  
PinchGlove The FakeSpace PinchGloves are gloves with contact sensors in each fingertip, which make them usable to "pinch"/manipulate objects in a Virtual Environent.  
SpaceBall The Labtec Spaceball is a six degree-of-freedom mouse with eight buttons that is suitable for navigation/interaction in 3D.  
MotionStar Our Ascension MotionStar trackersystem is a six degree-of-freedom tracker system with a long-range magnetic transmitter, nine sensors (with a maximum of twenty sensors). The maximum update frequency is 144Hz. The system is accessible via ethernet, which makes it possible to use the trackersystem from all SGI machines in the lab.

With nine sensors it is possible to use the trackersystem for whole-body motion tracking.

  
Fastrak The Fasttrack system is used in our Dextroscope.

With only two sensors the Polhemus Fastrack tracker system, is smaller than our Motionstar tracker system. The specifiactions for the Fasttrack system is:
  • 6 degree-of-freedom tracker system,
  • magnetic,
  • 2 sensors,
  • maximum 120Hz update rate.
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Updated: 2024-11-01, 13:56