Immersive full-surround multi-user system design

•We expanded and improved a 3-story immersive audiovisual instrument.•The system provides desktop-like (legacy content) and full-surround display modes.•We adopted and customized a general seamless surround blending framework.•Various visualization and sonification case studies exemplify the system in action.•Content proved one of the most important drivers of technology.

This paper describes our research in full-surround, multimodal, multi-user, immersive instrument design in a large VR instrument. The three-story instrument, designed for large-scale, multimodal representation of complex and potentially high-dimensional information, specifically focuses on multi-user participation by facilitating interdisciplinary teams of co-located researchers in exploring complex information through interactive visual and aural displays in a full-surround, immersive environment. We recently achieved several milestones in the instrument's design that improves multi-user participation when exploring complex data representations and scientific simulations. These milestones include affordances for “ensemble-style” interaction allowing groups of participants to see, hear, and explore data as a team using our multi-user tracking and interaction systems; separate visual display modes for rectangular legacy content and for seamless surround-view stereoscopic projection using 4 high-resolution, high-lumen projectors with hardware warping and blending integrated with 22 small-footprint projectors placed above and below the instrument's walkway; and a 3D spatial audio system enabling a variety of sound spatialization techniques. These facilities can be accessed and controlled by a multimodal framework for authoring applications integrating visual, audio, and interactive elements. We report on the achieved instrument design.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload high-quality image (242 K)Download as PowerPoint slide