Pioneers in Virtual Reality visit LRZ

On Wednesday, June 7, 2017, Prof. Carolina Cruz-Neira and Prof. Dirk Reiners, two luminaries in the world of virtual reality, visited the LRZ. The experts from the George W. Donaghey Emerging Analytics Center (EAC) at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA, came to see our Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation (V2C) and to have in-depth discussions with our team.

The teams from EAC and LRZ tackled topics from future developments in VR and visualisation in general to the developments at both centres.

The most intriguing part of their stay was obviously the visit to our V2C. The 5-sided projection installation, the crown jewel of the VR centre at LRZ. It is actually based on the idea of the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) which was invented by Prof. Cruz-Neira in the early 1990ies and which still sets the standard for VR installations today. The LRZ team showed the broad spectrum of applications visualized in Garching reaching from e.g. the Imperial Hall in the New Residence in Bamberg to a geophysical demo used to understand plate tectonics. Both Cruz-Neira and Reiners were impressed by the high quality of the images.

About Carolina Cruz-Neira

In her outstanding career, Prof. Cruz-Neira has tremendously influenced and shaped the scientific development of Virtual Reality: Already in the early 1990ies she invented the CAVE Audio Visual Environment for her PhD thesis at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Further milestones in her career include amongst others the position of the first CEO and Chief Scientist of LITE (Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise), a Louisiana State initiative to support economic development immersive technologies as well as acting as the director of the Emerging Analytics Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to date.

About Dirk Reiners

Prof. Dirk Reiners holds a PhD from TU Darmstadt and worked at the renowned Fraunhofer Institute before he continued his career in the United States. There he acted first as assistant professor at the IOWA State University, to become Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and finally at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Fabio Genz, Markus Wiedemann, Prof. Carolina Cruz-Neira, Prof. Dirk Reiners, Thomas Odaker (from left to right)
at the Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation (V2C)