When we visit NRaD the first (and only) time, we met a few groups there.
All groups but one are working on virtual reality (one on an authoring
environment, the other on a student-teacher type of trianing where all
people involved will be wearing head mounted displayes and they all
see different things....yet they are in the same cooperative environment.)
We felt that doing VR will be too much of a stretch for us. Then we
talked to Glen Osga's group. Glen himself was busy that day so he had
someone else in the group do a demo for us. The application is pretty
much like Pedro explained it. The application, as I understand it, is
only used in the lab for perception experiments. It runs on the Mac and
they are in the process of porting it to Motif. That's the only application
we thought we could relate to, plus people there seem to be convinced of
having a better tool which they can use. They mentioned doing 60 experiments
on the Mac version over a period of 5 years and the amount of development
which went in to making each successive version for the experiments was
enormous.
It's good that we're hooked up with them. Dave Keiras knows of Glenn's work,
so he too was thrilled when I told him of the connection. His work can
probably relate to Glenn's work somewhat. However, I don't think this
application is deployed for real use. (Pedro, am I wrong about this?
Is the motif version for more experiments or for deployment?) It might be
good to get more applications which will be deployed or applications of which
UI design depends on a better design environment. Something in the nature
which you suggests which belong to NRaD. In the introductory meeting which
we had there, some of them mention NRaD doing a lot of fast development
for deployment in navy shipsi...so I assume there's a development house
hidden somewhere. Carl might have seen us as innovative UI people and
put us in touch with only nifty stuff like VR.
--Noi