Aihua Zheng, left, and Naz Malek enjoy their visit to a high school landscape at the University of Arizona's virtual reality laboratory.

mamta popat / arizona daily star

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Forget Wii, Xbox and PlayStation, dude.

You want the good stuff, better be hitting the books over at the University of Arizona.

The UA has a bedroom-sized virtual-reality system that is so realistic it makes about 15 percent of users sick.

Of course the purpose of this conglomeration of technologies comprising the Arizona Laboratory for Immersive Visualization Environments — AZ-LIVE — isn't rescuing a princess or splattering Nazis.

Picture standing in a 10-foot square room. There's no ceiling, no wall behind you. But you won't notice that once Marvin Landis fires up the rack of computers driving the imagery.

The UA AZ-LIVE is staying up with near state-of-the-art VR technology and making it available to anyone from undergrads on up. It is most heavily employed by UA research scientists, some of whom have used it to visualize their molecular level research on a scale so grand they're able to walk through it and see the bonds.

A crystalline structure makes one feel like a giant wading through a solar system. The instinct is to duck from the objects floating in the air.

Or you can "fly," using a joy stick, up Bear Canyon into the Santa Catalina Mountains, pulling back to soar over Mt. Lemmon as though you were in a jet fighter.

Famed UA archaeologist David Soren used VR to re-create Chianciano Terme, the Roman natural-spring health spa he excavated in Italy.

The spa complex was in the Italian countryside and was reputed to have magical healing powers, said Soren.

It was the place Emperor Augustus "was miraculously cured," when he thought he was dying in 23 B.C.

With Landis' help, Soren recreated the flattened ruins. Now it's possible to virtually walk through it, fly over it, almost get your feet wet in the open-air, tiled pool, like the ailing emperor who found it roughly 2,000 years ago.

Soren and AZ-LIVE Director Landis say this level of VR sophistication may be as little as three years off for the general public, potentially revolutionizing how we will learn about archaeology and many subjects, first at museums and interpretive centers at historic sites — and then in our own homes.

Soren foresees an interactive version of a book he has co-authored on Chianciano Terme; it would have a DVD and special viewing goggles taking "readers" to the ancient site.

"You could become the worshipper, the sick person" visiting the healing waters," Soren said. "You won't read the book, you'll be the book."

For now, images are projected on the three walls and floor in a room within a room at the UA's Center for Computing & Information Technology.

Today's virtual visitor wears special goggles — like those giant black-rimmed sunglasses some elderly people wear over their regular glasses.

The hardware is only moderately intrusive, overwhelmed by the powerfully realistic images. There are none of the jagged edges so common to earlier VR systems, video games and simulations on two-dimensional computer screens. The goggles allow one to see real people and objects that are in the room, as well as the vividly colored objects in mid air — so real trying to touch them is irresistible.

The user can walk around Chianciano Terme's "pool," or stand still and use a handheld joystick to fly up, "touching" the walls or the tiles on the edge of the open roof, and soar over the adjoining countryside's green hills.

Or, using a file of images provided by a medical researcher, pull back on the joystick and bring a giant heart closer. Rotate it and stick your head down the sewer-pipe-sized aorta.

Anyone from undergrads to the university president can bring in data that they want to turn into a three-dimensional image and get help making it virtually real from the AZ-LIVE crew, says Landis.

Landis estimates there may be only 20 comparable systems in U.S. universities, and those that are open to anyone on campus are even more scarce.

He says the UA lab's users have ranged from a theater class that had live actors interacting with a virtual actor to scientists wanting to see the objects they study at the atomic level.

Landis recalls when Vincent Guerriero Jr., a UA scientist who had been working with a specific protein for about 10 years, finally got to see it on a grand scale.

"He tried to hug it," Landis recalls, noting that it's not uncommon for new users to react to the remarkable lifelike images.

Guerriero, an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology with a joint appointment in the UA's Department of Animal Sciences and the multi-disciplinary Bio5 Institute, said he had seen the protein on a three-dimensional simulation on his personal computer many times.

"Most of the stuff I can do right here on my desktop flatscreen," he said. "What I wanted (from AZ-LIVE) was more for entertainment purposes."

He said he hoped to get a picture of himself posing with the giant-sized 3-D image for inclusion in a PowerPoint presentation about his work with a group of scientists.

"Here's this protein we've been working on for the last 10 years. Here I am with my arm around it."

For Soren, this is far more than entertaining. It's helped him visualize the buried ruins he unearthed.

"When you're doing this kind of work you have 15 or 20 things dancing inside your mind at one time. One of which is how it looks inside. If you have the goggles, you don't have to keep that in your mind, you can rest and think about how it was put together. How do you roof it?" he said. "It (the VR) becomes almost like an arm out of your brain, a tool that can help you think more clearly, more concretely. I find it very restful in that sense."

Landis says the brains of AZ-LIVE, a rack of four Linux workstations each running two AMD 64-bit CPUs (processors) and the latest video cards, cost about $25,000. That new system replaces, and dramatically outperforms, a once-killer Silicon Graphics (SGI) array that cost $150,000 a few years ago.

Landis hopes the public's first exposure to VR at this level will be at a museum or at a park's interpretive center, where it could recreate some historic event.

"That's the kind of thing I'd like to see happen," he said, noting that the science center proposed for Rio Nuevo would be a good example, "where people could actually explore things you wouldn't get to explore in real life."

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