This project provides funds for focused investment in instrumentation for undergraduate study in the area of Virtual Reality and Scientific Visualization for undergraduates in Computer Science. A great deal of projects being performed in computer science and in undergraduate and graduate programs in the sciences center around collaborative scientific projects and the visualization of the results. Many of these projects use simulation and virtual reality to model virtual environments to help visualize scientific experiments. With so much activity in the scientific community today composed of collaborative projects that include and require computer scientists, a logical step at this time is to build a specialized laboratory and expose undergraduate students to the software techniques of virtual reality, virtual world modeling, and scientific visualization. Virtual reality and scientific visualization is composed of high-performance three-dimensional computer graphics for scientific modeling and simulations for training and experimentation in the natural and physical sciences. This project allows for greater graphical computational power, flexibility, and more efficiency, which will lead to increased productivity of faculty/student teams. This project may also provide a springboard for collaborative student projects between Computer Science and Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Meteorology majors. Many science students, as well as computer science students, can greatly benefit from this project, giving them opportunities to engage in high-performance computer simulations and visualization techniques at the undergraduate level. One of the primary objectives of this project is to boost student interest in pursuing more scholarly activities such as student publications, going on to graduate school, and seeking employment in scientific research-oriented institutions. This laboratory for experimentation in developing software for virtual environments may be of potential interest to other institutions and may lead to the development of new experiments and approaches in laboratory instruction in computer science.
