The Advanced Visualization Laboratory of the University of Maryland, College Park
Charles C. Goodrich, D. McNabb · ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics · 1992
The Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) of the University of Maryland, College Park campus, was created in October, 1991 to facilitate the use of state-of-the-art visualization techniques on campus. The complementary goals of the AVL are to meet the general graphics needs of the academic community by offering new user services, and to meet the specific needs of individual researchers by working with them to produce new visualization tools.Underlying the structure of the AVL is our conviction that strong ties must be maintained to both the academic research community and to university computing service organizations. Thus the AVL is a joint initiative of the Computer Science Center (CSC), which is responsible for academic computing support campus-wide, and the Astronomy Department, which has expertise in image processing and three-dimensional data visualization.The AVL provides several new user services. First, the laboratory provides a demonstration site where faculty and students can do hands-on evaluation of a variety of visualization software on a range of computers in a friendly environment. We currently have workstations from Apple Computer, Digital Equipment, IBM, Next, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems. Basic assistance in the use of software packages such as AVS, IBM Data Explorer, Data Visualizer, IDL, IRIS Explorer, PV-Wave, and Spyglass is available from the laboratory staff. Finally, but certainly not least, the AVL provides color output facilities on a fee-for-materials basis. We have a color printer, film recorder, and S-VHS/VHS videotape facility that is capable of frame accurate recording and digitization.