Working together as a Center has changed the way we do our research. The Center has made possible projects that could not otherwise be undertaken and has provided critical support for our broad-ranging interdisciplinary vision of the future of computer graphics and scientific visualization.
The Center has matured. Formidable roadblocks to doing research across five geographically dispersed sites, each with its own well-established research culture, have been cleared. Over the past six years, we have made significant progress toward our goals and have become more efficient at grasping problems and addressing them. As a result, the pace of our research has increased.
This coordination and growth has enhanced our ability to attack large-scale problems such as prototyping a telecollaboration system for mechanical design, applying our knowledge of global illumination to scene acquisition and image-based rendering, and implementing a comprehensive physically-based behavior modeling language. Research projects of such scope and duration would be impossible without a multi-university, interdisciplinary Center.
The Center is a distributed organization with no single dedicated building; we operate out of five university department and program labs. The lack of physical infrastructure has motivated the development of a sophisticated technological infrastructure to support research, education and outreach, and administration.
In 1992, we received a supplemental NSF grant to build an all-site interactive televideo system, using a dedicated T-1 line. This advanced video and datasharing system made possible several multi-site collaborations, including ambitious interdisciplinary projects in interaction and mechanical design. For example, the Utah site collaborated with Brown to develop 3D interfaces for Utah's Alpha_1 CAD system. As a result, Utah's modeling researchers developed a serious interest in the role of interaction in all phases of design, and researchers at Brown learned first hand about the engineering needs of real users.
The effect of this collaboration went beyond the Center to affect Chris Johnson's Scientific Computing and Imaging Group at the University of Utah. When Johnson saw the Center's 3D user interfaces widgets used with Alpha_1 and realized their potential, he began working with the Center to create similar 3D widgets for use in SCIRun, his soon-to-be-commercial computational steering software system. The collaboration expanded and now Johnson is an integral part of the Center's research in scientific visualization. The collaboration also had a ripple effect at Brown, inspiring the creation of a gestural modeling system for CAD that has attracted industrial funding from Autodesk and Alias/Wavefront.
Our televideo system also helped UNC and Utah to collaborate on several mechanical design and manufacturing projects. Most recently, a team of designers from the two sites worked together to create a casing for UNC's breakthrough compact video-based head-mounted display. This complex multi-disciplinary design problem involved interlocking design decisions for the device's optical and mechanical operations, as well as manufacturability and ergonomic decisions. Participants in the project believe that outsourcing would have required at least a three-month turnaround time and several iterations to produce a usable part. Working over the televideo system, the Center teams completed the project in three weeks and the part was successfully manufactured on the first attempt.
Our experience in multi-site distance collaboration for mechanical CAD provided motivation and inspiration for our most ambitious collaboration to date, a five-site project to build a prototype telecollaboration system for mechanical design. This long-term, Center-inspired project is not only relevant to our specific research needs, but will provide a model for distributed research for the next century.
With strong leadership by the founding and current Directors, the number of collaborative projects has dramatically increased over the last three years, from four to ten ongoing projects. Seven of them are in nascent areas not originally in our research vision; four of these are part of the telecollaboration project alone. These seven collaborative projects are funded through the Director's Pool, a mechanism that lets the Director promote collaborative work and responsively steer research into priority areas, rapidly allocating seed funds to projects that support the Center's vision and show promise for external funding.
Our distributed Center has inspired innovation in infrastructure for computer graphics. We have created new intellectual and logistical approaches to research and education and have developed techniques necessary to manage coordinated research, education, and outreach among multiple sites spread across multiple time zones.
All our sites were known for their excellent education and research (and integration of the two) before the inception of the Center, but each operated as an island. Now, because of the Center, permanent bridges have been constructed. Junior faculty are exposed to PIs from all the sites and their different approaches, providing insight into the research, planning and organization that go into large research projects. Faculty and students from one site often continue their work at another (as graduate students, postdoctorate researchers, and junior and senior faculty members), more closely interweaving knowledge from all the sites. Our students take a Center class together-our graduate televideo seminar, attended and taught by all five sites. The students meet over the televideo and in person in yearly workshops and other events, and they take interdisciplinary courses inspired by faculty's participation in the Center. They pursue a degree within an individual university but receive an education that includes perspectives from all five schools. No other type of funding would have made this possible.
The Center's graduates bring their unique educational experience to bear in industry, providing our most effective form of technology transfer. With graduates at virtually every major graphics-related company and at the helms of several startups, the Center has a continuing dialogue with all aspects of the industry.
Finally, the majority of our outreach programs would simply not exist without the Center. These include not only programs at specific sites that support the Center's outreach strategy, such as programs for women and minorities at Utah and Brown, but collaborative multi-site efforts with the potential to reach thousands of people, such as the Center-wide Web-based Academic Resource Project (WARP) for interactive teaching tools for K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students.
Our experience over the past six years has confirmed our original conviction that the ultimate goal of our Center could never be achieved with individual research grants-no one person or even academic institution has the necessary breadth and depth, or the infrastructure, to organize and lead such endeavors.
The collaborative and single-site projects that contribute to the Center's mission, and the education and outreach across all five sites, all depend on the Center mode of funding for targeted monetary support and for the direction provided by the vision of the Center. The Center is now a rigorously managed and purposively directed organization capable of pursuing the next steps toward its goal of strengthening the foundations of computer graphics.