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Heather Emmons, 775-673-7313, heather.emmons@dri.edu
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December 23, 2004
DRI names Sherman interim head of CAVE®
facility
|
William
Sherman
|
Reno, Nev. – William
R. Sherman has been named interim director of Desert Research Institute’s
modeling and visualization laboratory, which includes the proposed CAVE® facility.
An acronym for “CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment,” it features
technology developed at the University
of Illinois under
the auspices of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
The CAVE is aimed at improving DRI’s ability to simulate
real-world environments visually and to interact with those simulations in
ways that reflect real-world circumstances.
Sherman, 40, who
earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, has been affiliated with that university’s National Center for
Supercomputing Applications since 1989. He is co-author
of the 2003 book, “Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface,
Application, and Design.”
Dr. J. Scott Hauger, DRI vice president of government
and business relations and principal investigator for the CAVE project, believes Sherman is
uniquely qualified for the position. “Bill
has been at the center of virtual reality development and applications for nearly
15 years. At NCSA, which is widely recognized as a mecca of virtual reality,
he led that effort since 1992. He is an expert in scientific visualization and
in the operations of a CAVE facility,” Hauger said.
Visualization technology is quickly becoming a cornerstone of world-class science,
and DRI’s CAVE visualization laboratory is one of the institute’s
most important new projects.
To expand DRI’s capabilities in environmental computing, modeling and simulation, Nevada’s
congressional delegation, led by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., sponsored a federal
appropriation to establish an advanced visualization capability. An initial appropriation
of $3 million was made in the 2004 fiscal year to support the first phase of
this initiative. An additional federal appropriation
request of $6 million was recently approved for the 2005 defense budget.
DRI has a pending request of $14.4 million from the State of Nevada for
a new building to house the CAVE facility. When the
building is completed and a six-sided CAVE is installed, DRI will have a fully
functional, well staffed, state-of-the-art laboratory for advanced environmental
modeling and visualization that can be used to support both the needs of the
nation and Nevada.
Today’s visualization technologies use sight, sound and even touch to present
complex data in scientific research applications. They
can simulate real-world environments for training and research that are otherwise
unavailable or too costly. They can support scientists
in their visualization of complex phenomena that are otherwise invisible because
they are very small, underground, invisible to the naked eye, or operate on a
time scale—very fast or very slow—that is not readily accessible
in the lab.
A nonprofit, statewide division of the University and Community College System
of Nevada, DRI pursues a full-time program of basic and applied environmental
research on a local, national and international scale. DRI currently employs
500 people in Reno and Las
Vegas and had total revenues of approximately $45 million
in the 2004 fiscal year.
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