Please join us Weds, 2 Nov (6p CII3206 and CII3211; pizza 5:30) as John Erickson leads a discussion and tour of the Rensselaer IDEA Campfire, a multi-user, collaborative, immersive visualization environment. The Campfire is a desk-height, 10-foot panoramic screen (the "Wall") and floor projection ("Floor") that users gather around and look into, maintaining contact with one another with no artificial or virtual barriers between themselves as they observe and engage with presentations and applications. Two large monitors adjacent to the Campfire complement the integrated Wall and Floor visualizations with appropriate content, enabling investigators to be fully immersed in their exploratory tasks.
Since 2018 RPI undergrad and graduate researchers have produced many compelling, interactive applications for the Campfire based on the IDEA-created mwshiny (Multi-Window Shiny) CRAN package; the R-based "Twitter Time Machine" application won Best Poster at the 2019 ACm Web Science conference. Tight integration between the IDEA Compute Cluster and the Campfire allows for remote development and easy deployment onto the Campfire hardware. Student work supervised by Eric Ameres during 2022 has expanded the range of Campfire capabilities to include Unity-based applications, with integrated Unity+R apps in the future.
Logistics:
- We will meet in CII 3206 (to the left of the CII ground-level elevators) for pizza and salad (arriving approx. 5:30p)
- After a brief overview we will move to the Campfire Lab (CII 3211) to play with the Campfire
Links:
- mwshiny: 'Shiny' for Multiple Windows: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/mwshiny/
- Twitter Time Machine Poster (WebSci 2019): https://bit.ly/ttm-websci2019