Manchester Visualisation Centre installs 1 million euro VR facility

Manchester 05 Apr 00 The Manchester Visualisation Centre ordered a 1 million euro VR facility with Virtual Presence, a subsidiary of MUSE Technologies. The order includes setting up high-performance visual computing platforms for researchers, students and commercial users to project real time graphics in a three-screen theatre. The presentation of data in a theatre setting using extremely high-resolution graphics improves interaction with the data so that large groups of users from different disciplines can collaborate and reach conclusions as a team. Virtual Presence has previously collaborated with the University of Manchester on other projects, including the development of MIST (Minimally Invasive Surgical Trainer), an advanced computer-based system designed to teach and assess minimally invasive surgical skills. More than 125 MIST systems are in use at 70 medical institutions worldwide.

The contract calls for MUSE's Virtual Presence group to perform extensive work at the MVC, which is located at the University of Manchester (UK).

John Hough, Managing Director of Virtual Presence, noted, "This project represents nearly a full year of planning by our London and Manchester technical teams, and will establish a new precedent for human-scale visualisation. We are delighted to continue our long-standing collaboration with Manchester University."

When completed, the MVC system will consist of a series of rack-mounted Silicon Graphics Onyx2 supercomputers equipped with six SGI InfiniteReality2 graphics pipelines and SGI's DPLEX option, which permits all graphics pipelines to be concentrated into a single resource for maximum visualisation and performance. Human-scale immersive 3D display will be delivered using Panoram Technologies' GVR-120 visualisation theatre.

Software provided under the contract includes MuSE (Multi-Dimensional user-oriented Synthetic Environment)2000, a full-featured application development system that integrates advanced data visualisation, immersive technology and networked collaboration capabilities. Applications created with the award-winning software allow users to explore and interact with all types of data using both sight and sound. The result is that users can quickly make sense of complex trends, patterns and anomalies.

FrameSET (Framework for Simulation, Education & Training) is a training management programme developed by Virtual Presence that permits education administrators to adapt training programmes to the needs of individual trainees and review, compare and analyse the performance of individuals and groups in a training programme.

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