Hummingbird is an innovative, award-winning performance engaging participants in active storytelling that bridges live theater and collaborative interaction through virtual reality (VR). Hummingbird's story celebrates courage and coming of age through the eyes of a gutsy teen who must outsmart her mother's egotistic boss and survive a dangerous new technology in a live, immersive adventure. Developed at the University of Illinois Chicago by faculty and over 30 students from the departments of Computer Science and Design in partnership with professional theater producers, directors, actors, videographers and composers, this project advanced interdisciplinary collaboration, provided a unique learning environment and broadened the research experience for several cohorts of students. Over 500 people attended Hummingbird's performances at the Tony Award-winning Goodman Theatre's New Stages Festival, Chicago Children's Theater and SIGGRAPH 2022 in Vancouver, Canada, with over 200 active VR participants. In each performance, five VR participants actively collaborate with each other and a lead actor within the VR adventure, contributing problem-solving, collaboration and teamwork, while a greater audience simultaneously follows the virtual performance aspects on a large video wall in real-time. Discussion sessions and audience evaluations followed each performance, informed the Hummingbird team on script, design and interactivity to improve future performances. Through qualitative analysis of audience experiences and insights from our collaboration, we discuss key considerations and design recommendations for integrating VR with live theater. Hummingbird demonstrates how VR can revolutionize theatrical storytelling by enabling traditional theater to narrate epic stories that were once considered too ambitious for traditional stage by extending live theater and making VR accessible to a broader audience. This project serves as a prototype for successful partnerships between nonprofit theater and interdisciplinary research institutions to increase opportunities for cross-disciplinary student education.

SAGE (the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) and its successor SAGE2 (the Scalable Amplified Group Environment) are operating systems for managing content across wideband display environments. This paper documents the prevalent usage patterns of SAGE-enabled display walls in support of the e-Science enterprise, based on nearly 15 years of observations of the SAGE community. These patterns will help guide e-Science users and cyberinfrastructure developers on how best to leverage large tiled display walls, and the types of software services that could be provided in the future.

Multi device environments present new opportunities for collaborative visual data analysis and sense making by utilizing each device's strengths and capabilities. However, one of the associated challenges with visual data analysis in multi device environments is the sharing of visual components across devices. We present a framework developed on top of SAGE2 platform for cross-device collaborative visual data exploration. As part of our framework, we contribute the concept of rapid development and assembling of visualizations that can span multiple devices of different modalities. It provides the users with an environment for visualization compositions that delegate the rendering to the target device, allowing them to augment their large display workspace with portable devices for further exploration territories. Facilitated by its intuitive visualization composition pipeline, users with no programming skills such as data analysts can enhance their analytical scope with no coding barriers. We describe the framework, its implementation with a use case, and the rationale behind its design.

Classic visual analysis relies on a single medium for displaying and interacting with data. Large-scale tiled display walls, virtual reality using head-mounted displays or CAVE systems, and collaborative touch screens have all been utilized for data exploration and analysis. We present our initial findings of combining numerous display environments and input modalities to create an interactive multi-modal display space that enables researchers to leverage various pieces of technology that will best suit specific sub-tasks. Our main contributions are 1) the deployment of an input server that interfaces with a wide array of interaction devices to create a single uniform stream of data usable by custom visual applications, and 2) three real-world use cases of leveraging multiple display environments in conjunction with one another to enhance scientific discovery and data dissemination.

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive Virtual Reality narrative performance developed in Unity for the CAVE2™ large-scale 320-degree panoramic virtual reality environment at the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The work provides an experience of true stories of abusive violence, battlefield torture and post-traumatic stress during the American-led counterinsurgency and counter terrorism campaigns in Iraq in the years after September 11, 2001. The immersive virtual reality environment of the CAVE2™ is used to communicate both difficult truths about torture and to produce an affective impression of the how these practices were experienced by individual American soldiers.

Current web-based collaboration systems, such as Google Hangouts, WebEx, and Skype, primarily enable single users to work with remote collaborators through video conferencing and desktop mirroring. The original SAGE software, developed in 2004 and adopted at over one hundred international sites, was

In the domain of large-scale visualization instruments, hybrid reality environments (HREs) are a recent innovation that combines the best-in-class capabilities of immersive environments, with the best-in-class capabilities of ultra-high-resolution display walls. HREs create a seamless 2D/3D environment that supports both information-rich analysis as well as virtual reality simulation exploration at a resolution matching human visual acuity. Co-located research groups in HREs tend to work on a variety of tasks during a research session (sometimes in parallel), and these tasks require 2D data views, 3D views, linking between them and the ability to bring in (or hide) data quickly as needed. In this paper we present Omegalib, a software framework that facilitates application development on HREs. Omegalib is designed to support dynamic reconfigurability of the display environment, so that areas of the display can be interactively allocated to 2D or 3D workspaces as needed. Compared to existing frameworks and toolkits, Omegalib makes it possible to have multiple immersive applications running on a cluster-controlled display system, have different input sources dynamically routed to applications, and have rendering results optionally redirected to a distributed compositing manager. Omegalib supports pluggable front-ends, to simplify the integration of third-party libraries like OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph, and the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). We present examples of applications developed with Omegalib for the 74-megapixel, 72-tile CAVE2™ system, and show how a Hybrid Reality Environment proved effective in supporting work for a co-located research group in the environmental sciences.

This video describes the CAVE2 Hybrid Reality Environment developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). CAVE2 is a near-seamless flat-panel-based, surround-screen immersive system that can simultaneously display both 2D and 3D information, providing more flexibility for mixed media applications and more opportunities for groups of researchers to work together with large heterogeneous datasets [1]. CAVE2 is a cylindrical system of 24 feet in diameter and 8 feet tall, and consists of 72 near-seamless, off-axis-optimized passive-stereo LCD panels, creating a 320-degree panoramic environment for displaying information at 37 Megapixels (in stereoscopic 3D) or 74 Megapixels in 2D and at a horizontal visual acuity of 20/20 [2]. Custom LCD panels with shifted polarizers were built so the images in the top and bottom rows of LCDs are optimized for vertical off-center viewing, allowing viewers to come closer to the displays while minimizing ghosting. EVL's Omegalib middleware supports fully immersive OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph and VTK applications, as well as EVL's SAGE middleware to achieve a hybrid 2D/3D environment. CAVE2 also supports CalVR (developed at the Calit2 Qualcomm Institute at University of California, San Diego), Electro (by Robert Kooima, currently at Louisiana State University) and Google Earth.