Visualisation Facilities

One of the main focuses of the IITAC programme is allowing the comprising groups to conduct multidisciplinary research. Nowadays, this capability is vital in the furthering of scientific knowledge, since the most important scientific problems can only be addressed by bringing together groups of scientists from different disciplines, and allowing them to work together with the tools that allow them not only to solve the problem but to communicate with each other in a effective and transparent way.

One of the ways in which the IITAC programme is addressing this goal is by developing a visualisation expertise. The Visualisation group has four main goals. The first one is to conduct the technical research in the computational and numerical field so as to provide the support required for scientific computing. The second goal is to develop an expertise in integrating different scientific research environments as means to allow scientists to solve their own computational problems using the experience obtained by previous groups. The third goal is to develop new scientific visualisation techniques and tools to increase the understanding of complex scientific data.

The development of this expertise is of great importance for all the TCD scientific community, mainly for two reasons. The first is that immersive stereoscopic displays are a technology that is currently under development but that will probably be widespread in less than a decade. As Internet, or the current two and three dimensional computer representations, the IITAC visualisation initiative puts the scientific community at TCD in the position of being able to be a mayor player in this field in the near future.

The second is that three dimensional visualisation allows scientists to display their results in a more understandable way, thus allowing non-scientific spectators that under other circumstances would not be able to grasp the meaning of the research generated by TCD scientists. This makes the knowledge generated by the researchers accessible and usable not only to the scientific community but also to the government and industry.

Last updated: Sep 11 2006