At least one reason we make hand gestures
when we talk is to help people see what we
mean. Visualization is a critical part of un-
derstanding. On the computer, 3D visual-
ization opens up the door to collaboration
and decision-making. Not many people
make decisions based on hand waving.
e fi eld of visualization and, especially,
immersive visualization is utterly booming,
with changes happening in every area of
the industry as designers and scientists push
the technology for greater realism, while
hardware architectures rise to the chal-
lenge. Systems are being built on what can
only be called a grand scale. For instance,
several visualization centers have been built
that take advantage of Sony's 4 projectors
for super high resolutions and crazy real-
ism—or, at least, it used to be crazy; now
it's just expensive.
What's changing right in front of our
eyes is the range of tools available for this
purpose. A lot of the high-end visualiza-
tion systems we have now came from
work done in the 1980s by Carolina
Cruz-Neira, Tom DeFanti, and Dan San-
din at the University of Illinois, Chicago,
where the fi rst CAVE (Cave Automatic
February 2009 26
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Visualization
