7 May 2013

A 4-screen vault, a system which can display up to 120 images per second in real time, unbelievable calculating and storage capacity, and, in particular, the feeling of being in a very real world: all of this describes the new immersive visualization (3-D) laboratory that has just been launched by the Université de Sherbrooke’s Faculty of Science.

It constitutes the first real interactive 3-D experience in Canada.

The laboratory offers a virtual environment that is revolutionizing university teaching and research. The system allows immersive visualization of dynamic scenes and spatial representation of various phenomena, especially in medicine, engineering, history, psychology, education, and marketing.

Among the many possibilities which the vault allows, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, let us note the virtual reconstitution of a historic site and visualization of processes taking place at the molecular level.

The laboratory is the fruit of more than five years’ work carried out by Professors Djemel Ziou, from the computer-science department, and André Dieter Bandrauk, from the chemistry department, and their respective teams.

The immersive visualization laboratory is part of the Faculty of Science’s interactive and visual molecular modeling (i-MOVI) project, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and supported by National Defence and BRP.

Source: Université de Sherbrooke
Photo credit : Michel Caron