From: ih3e@ra.cs.Virginia.EDU
Subject:  Lab Report from Univ. of Virginia.
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 91 12:41:01 EST


As I am the requestor of such information and greatly!!!!! appreciate your
efforts in collecting it I will freely discuss what we are doing in our lab.
Another point of view, especially for universities, is that some private
firms who are also in the VR field can see what we are doing and maybe
just maybe would like to sample or hopefully support some of our work.
This would bring in more funding for the university.  Maybe just another
reson for the university people to truthfully respond to this.

We have many projects running at the same time. Our group is about 14 people.
We are working on text to speech, which is working, but using gesture input
devices of all different kinds.  The major research that remains is the mapping
of phonetics on the screen and some smaller details.

Another project is trying to get VR up and running on two PC, distributing the
workload between the two, Stereoscopy, sound, and gesture input, and have the
two computers talk to each other letter the program know what is going on.

Some people are rewriting SRGP into smaller and more compact versions for the
PC and writing more bit editors and drawing utilities based on the SRGP
package.

We have developed a tool that allows us to interactily change the widgets,
size etc and it is very easy to use.  We are trying to bring animation
to this package.  It is a sort or windowing, graphics package with a very low
startup learn phase.  There are also many other activities including support
for the main projects such as changeing all the routines from polling to
interrup0t driven etc.  My main job right now is to keep the hardware up and
running and install the new hardware.  We are beginning to add voice input and
sound output to VR programs.

I am also working on networking our lab using NETWARE 2.15.  I am a sub sys op
for the university net.

        Hope this helps and hgood luck.  I would appreciate a copy of all the
        returns you get.  Thanks Ian.

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Ian Hoenisch (ih3e@virginia.edu) or (ih3e@uvacs.cs.virginia.edu)
Graduate Student, Computer Science Department, Thornton Hall,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2442
Virtual reality is REAL; How real is virtuality?
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