Envision Center celebrating 15th anniversary, unveiling new collaborative virtual reality environment at April 17 open house

ITaP’s Envision Center is turning 15 – and its birthday party will be a public open house featuring the unveiling of “The Forge,” the center’s new collaborative environment that allows multiple people to share one virtual reality or augmented reality experience.

The open house, scheduled for 1-3 p.m. April 17, is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. The Envision Center is in Stewart Center, Room B001, which is located off the tunnel between the Stewart Center and the Purdue Memorial Union.

The Forge will allow “classrooms to run fully virtually, everyone with their own perspective,” says George Takahashi, the center’s technical lead. “You could have a professor looking at a complex, three-dimensional data set and an entire class around him, exploring that data set together.”

The application that will be used to showcase The Forge at the April open house is a visualization of a supernova remnant – what’s left behind when a giant star explodes – that was built in collaboration with Danny Milisavljevic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy.

The Envision Center’s staff and student employees work with faculty partners and external clients to create virtual reality and data visualization tools for research and educational use. The center also collaborates on grant proposals and develops promotional media such as publication quality stills and animated videos.

The open house will also feature a virtual reality simulator designed to protect construction workers from falls developed in collaboration with James Jenkins, an associate professor of construction management technology, and funded by a grant from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. A glimpse of this project was showcased at Dawn or Doom ’18, but now the full simulation is ready to be unveiled.

Also on display: a simulation to teach the safe handling of radioactive materials that was built by the Envision Center in collaboration with Kara Weatherman, clinical associate professor of pharmacy practice, who focuses on nuclear pharmacy.

For more information about working with the Envision Center or questions about the open house, contact envision@purdue.edu.

Writer:  Adrienne Miller, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, mill2027@purdue.edu.

Last updated: March 1, 2019