July 10, 2001 Applying virtual reality to help scientists to see
and handle their data is the aim of the Center for Image
Processing and Integrated Computing (CIPIC) at the University of
California, Davis. The center has also been teaching students
how to build and work with virtual reality environments in one
of a handful of courses of its kind in the U.S. "It's about
making the invisible visible," said Bernd Hamann, co-director of
CIPIC. The aims of CIPIC are to develop technology for handling
very large amounts of data, to establish visualization
technology at UC Davis, and to enable transfer of new inventions
from the lab bench into industry, Hamann said. Modern research
generates huge volumes of data, for example from genome
sequencing, satellite imaging, measuring traffic patterns or
simulating very complex problems such as climate change. Medical
imaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
and positron emission tomography (PET) also generate huge
datasets. Virtual reality could be us