Leeds University acts as a node of vizNET with links to other north-east region universities: Durham, Hull, Newcastle, Sheffield and York. It publish reports on topics of interest to the visualization community - particularly in the areas of large-screen displays and distributed visualization. A Seminar series acts as a focus for collaboration and networking. At Leeds, the activity is centred within the Visualization and Virtual Reality Research Group (VVR).

Leeds has a broad range of research expertise in visualization spanning across visualization systems and algorithms, in both scientific and information visualization, and also encompasses navigation in visualization spaces.

Research Themes

The visualization group have collaborated with other UK groups in a range of projects in e-science, including : gViz (looking at Grid-based visualization and computational steering); e-Viz (looking at ‘intelligent’ high performance visualization); Integrative Biology (looking at applications to heart and cancer modelling); Astrogrid (looking at multivariate visualization for astronomy); and a new fundamental computing project exploring novel programming techniques for adapting algorithms and data representation to grid resources. Leeds area of expertise within VizNET would focus on the following:

• Computational steering. The experiences gained in providing visual interfaces to remote simulations will be disseminated to a wider audience through the vizNET activities.
• Collaborative visualization. Much of e-science is collaborative, but users need guidance on how to exploit new forms of electronic collaboration in their work. Leeds experience in this area for over a decade can be disseminated through vizNET.
• Information Visualization. Although some data represent measurements of physical processes and can be visualized directly, for other applications areas, including business, bio- and health-informatics, data is often more abstract. Visualization of this data involves finding suitable visual metaphors, and when the data is large, users require novel interaction techniques to explore the data without becoming lost in its complexity. Leeds' experience in this area, including work on visualizing network graphs and depiction techniques, and visualization of high dimensional and multivariate data, will be disseminated.
• Navigation and interaction. Many visualization environments are large-scale, and the problems users have maintaining their spatial orientation are well known. Leeds have an established track record studying ways of aiding navigation in large virtual spaces, and detailed aspects of individual and collaborative interaction.

Major Facilities

There are a range of visualization facilities at Leeds, including large screen stereo screens and a stereo Holobench. A focus now is on high quality equipment that can be sited in a researcher’s office: this includes high resolution IBM T221 displays, and 3D stereo workstations with attached haptic devices. A cluster-based visualization system is being procured with SRIF funding, in order to provide a rendering service to the desktop, augmenting SGI Onyx and Prism systems.