News
Submitted by Indiana University on Thu, 01/17/2019 - 12:52
High-end visualization facilities such as projection-based CAVEs, tiled-LCD CAVE2s, and large-format tiled arrays of projectors or LCDs are tremendous technical achievements. They are engaging and inspiring, and in the hands of technical experts, they can be extremely useful. Unfortunately, these high-end systems suffer from inherent problems of high cost and high complexity that translate into accessibility challenges for users. The high cost of these systems means that there is at most one at any given university or campus; thus, the resource has physical accessibility challenges which limit its use to those who are willing and able to relocate their activities to the facility and are able to schedule time on the system. The high complexity of the
Submitted by Micah Vandegrift on Mon, 12/10/2018 - 14:28
If you’ve been following along with the Immersive Scholar blog posts, you already know that one of the key problems the Immersive Scholar program seeks to address is the lack of technical standards and guidelines for interoperability, sharing, reproducing, and evaluating digital scholarship in large-scale visualization environments. At NCSU Libraries, the Immersive Scholar leadership team is taking an holistic approach to addressing these issues through developing best practices for responsive design, asking questions about the evaluation and assessment of visualizations as scholarly products, and experimenting with residencies for content development.
Submitted by Brown University on Mon, 11/05/2018 - 12:51
As described in a previous post, the Glider project seeks to address a common problem: institutions buy expensive display walls, only to find that there are few out-of-the-box applications that immediately serve to demonstrate their value.
Glider seeks to address this problem by allowing users with a wide range of technical skills to create custom, novel applications for display walls.
Submitted by University of California Berkeley on Mon, 07/16/2018 - 09:35
The Immersive Scholar program brings together a diverse group of universities to form a community of practice around immersive visualization technologies in libraries and learning spaces. At UC Berkeley, we are exploring new directions for these technologies in a special kind of learning space: museums. In the context of research universities like Berkeley, museums are powerful environments for research, teaching and learning, and public engagement. Most often, each museum specializes in a domain such as art or entomology, and many are primarily devoted to research, having little or even no exhibition space. Brought together, however, they represent an incredibly rich resource and fertile ground in which to apply new technologies for visualization and engagement.
Submitted by mgwust on Fri, 06/22/2018 - 16:13
This is a guest post from Dr. John Wall (English, North Carolina State University), the principal investigator of the Virtual Paul's Cross Project. As an example of immersive scholarship, we invited Dr. Wall to describe this project in detail. This post also describes the intensive and necessarily collaborative nature of work like this, a topic that we expect to be central to the Immersive Scholar project overall; how should this type of scholarship be evaluated, assigned credit, and apportioned intellectual merit?
Submitted by Micah Vandegrift on Thu, 05/31/2018 - 13:30
This is a guest post from Neale Stokes of the Los Angles Public Library detailing his experience at the Digital Signage Expo in March. He offers an overview of the conference, and some of his takeaway thoughts.
Submitted by Brown University on Mon, 04/23/2018 - 12:18
The Immersive Scholar program arose from the proliferation of "large-scale and immersive visualization environments" in academic contexts. But what exactly is an "immersive visualization environment"? And what is its typical use case?
While many of these spaces share strengths and challenges, there is also significant variation from site to site. The following is a quick profile of the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at Brown University Library.
Background and Setup
The DSL was opened in the fall of 2012. It is a medium-sized room largely dominated by the 16x9 foot display wall located oppose the entrance door.
Submitted by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Mon, 04/09/2018 - 15:59
The Visualization of Researcher Impact Metrics in a Variety of Display Environments
By: William H. Mischo, Mary C. Schlembach, and Saajan Dehury
Submitted by Virginia Commonwealth University on Tue, 03/27/2018 - 13:29
Having watched with not a little envy as other institutions developed and deployed large-scale visualization environments and projects (see other posts on this site!), Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries found itself in 2016 and early 2017 starting to think hard about thinking about the particular needs of the VCU community for support with visualization technologies. We had some visualization technologies and tools but had not yet developed a formalized program.
Submitted by Indiana University on Tue, 03/20/2018 - 16:28
The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) and the Center for Network Science (CNS), both units at Indiana University (IU), are proud to be a partner on the Immersive Scholar project. The AVL is the premier support unit for visualization-related activities at IU. Its mission is to promote the innovative application of visual technologies that enhance the University’s research, education, creative, and community engagement activities. It targets to enable and empower the IU community and supports all departments across 2 major research campuses and 6 smaller regional campuses. The Lab provides free access to a wide range of systems including, but not limited to: