The Manchester Visualization Centre (MVC) performs both service provision, and research and development in high-performance interactive computer graphics, virtual environments, multimedia, image processing and visualization. Our remit is to provide a key service for many users’ visualization needs within the University of Manchester, with a strong current emphasis on the Medical and Scientific communities. We have a large sub-team dedicated to furthering software product research and design for creating the next generation of visualization environments (total team includes 10 members of staff and 7 PhD students).

Research Themes

A series of projects have incorporated high-end collaboration, remote steering, wireless control, grid enablement, novel rendering tools and extreme data-sets amongst others. Key issues for future use by the vizNET consortium would focus on:

• Large-scale parallelized visualization pipeline architectures, built on the expertise in developing and integrating the AVS/Express Multipipe Edition (MPE) and Parallel Support Toolkit (PST) now available from Advanced Visual Systems. Joint efforts undertaken by the MVC, SGI, AVS and Kubota Graphics Technology (KGT)
• Integration of high performance computing with high performance visualization for national users: CSAR/NGS. Manchester Computing is in early negotiations to become a NGS (National Grid Services) Visualization Partner and already provides specialist dedicated visualization support to CSAR users.
• Codec design and integration within the Access Grid – next generation of Video Conferencing – environment, integrating projects with the Access Grid Support Centre to distribute in new ways scientific and video data across the globe.
• Office and portable visualization facilities incorporating software and hardware cookbook recommendations. This allows remote visualization to be experiences at high quality anywhere.
• Specialist Scientific Visualization best practice dissemination extended from regular local and EU Erasmus training for a range of software tools, including core development in AVS/Express and TGS/Amira.

Major Facilities

Within the research support services we have strong project links to CSAR (Computer Service for Academic Research) HPC facilities, consisting primarily of a 512 Itanium2 Altix 3700 and a 512 MIPS Origin 3800, as well as the e-Science North West Centre and the Access Grid Support Centre. Dedicated visualization computing is delivered from multiple PC clusters or a 32 processor SGI Onyx 300 with 6 Infinite Reality graphics pipes that either distribute multiple video streams (cf VizServer) or direct to one of two dedicated environment centres. The VIPL (Visualization Immersive Projection Laboratory) is a curved screen virtual environment centre that features three front-projection blended displays, 6 channels surround sound audio, with Integrator 3 control and is compatible with active matrix stereographic glasses and emitters. The VIPL was installed in 2000 and a new passive stereo PC cluster six projection flat wall system, experimentally augmented with the Access Grid environment, has just been constructed and is launched in March 2004. Development of high-quality portable units is also currently underway allowing both open source and commercial tools to be used outside of specialist theatres.