ARCHIVED: At IU, what is the Advanced Visualization Lab?

The AVL is the main support team for visualization-related activities at IU. The AVL collaborates with IU students, faculty, and staff to deliver engaging and impactful applications of advanced visualization technologies used in research, education, creative activity, and community outreach. The AVL promotes, maintains, and provides open access to a variety of advanced hardware and software resources, and delivers a range of consulting and development services by a staff with expertise that spans a variety of areas related to visualization.

The AVL, a team of UITS Research Technologies affiliated with the Pervasive Technology Institute, delivers its services to the IU community via three functional groups:

• Advanced Digital Arts and Media: This team embodies IU's long, successful history of supporting the innovative use of advanced IT for creative endeavors. For the arts, the team uses a range of hardware and software to develop custom displays, sensor systems, and interactive interfaces to help realize the creative visions of IU artists. For advanced media forms, the team proactively explores new technologies, prototypes workflows, provides hardware resources, and educates users. The team partners with key IU departments and initiatives, including the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, the School of Fine Arts and Telecommunications Department at IU Bloomington, the Media Arts and Sciences program at IUPUI, and the IU Cinema.
• Scalable Visualization and Virtual Reality: This team provides expertise in a range of software-based visual techniques, including scientific visualization, information visualization, interactive virtual reality environments, visual simulation, and 3D modeling and rendering techniques. The team develops scalable, sustainable, and repeatable workflows using a combination of visualization hardware, open standards, open source and commercial software, and custom software extensions. The team partners with local and national groups to expand services, leverage cyberinfrastructure, and advance open community projects.
• Visualization Displays and Systems: This team designs, deploys, and maintains a variety of advanced visualization displays, compute systems, interface devices, and data acquisition systems. The team implements Research Technology's vision of a tiered visual cyberinfrastructure at IU. Comprised of a few centralized, high-end systems per campus and a larger number of mid-range systems distributed across departments and buildings, this visual cyberinfrastructure complements ubiquitous desktop workstations and grid-based visualization workflows.