Next Generation Immersive Visualization Environments

This paper describes the initial development of next generation high performance, flexible, relatively inexpensive, spatially immersive visualization environments. The systems being developed have configurations utilizing polyhedral display surfaces with large numbers of identical modular components and networked visual computer clusters. For the most part, the computer clusters are created using off the shelf, relatively inexpensive, commodity items. Current and near-future technologies and computational economics allow the development of better and more cost effective spatially immersive visualization systems. These systems promise better approximations to the ideal surrounding spherical display surface that presents very high resolution real-time wrap-around views of very complex data. The focus of this work is on exploring and evaluating this new class of systems to determine their practicality and effectiveness.