Everywhere around us the world sparkles our imagination. Whether we are walking on the street, watching television or sales presentations, our imagination is triggered all the time. People are very much visually oriented, and that is why our own visual impressions can actually convince us during business talks or cool commercials.

The specialists of SARA's department High Performance Computing & Visualization (HPC&V) create visualizations for quite a number of different modalities of media. Because of the rather long record with visualization, which has started in 1985, SARA is perfectly capable of providing you with the right information, so that you will be able to select the right medium. As such, a presentation in our CAVE™ is always very visually appealing and overwhelming. But your situation may ask for another type of facility because you would like to go on the road with your presentation. Insight Services has a number of different facilities, which are available for your purposes.

Almost any company or institution can make use of visualization and/or virtual reality presentations. Where most of us have a pretty clear view on nowadays visualization techniques, it is almost impossible to describe the fully immersive virtual reality in our CAVE. An application or presentation in our CAVE is truly an experience.

A few of the fields where virtual reality has been applied successfully are architecture, medicine and microbiology. SARA provides services to each of these fields.

There are numerous advantages of using visualization and virtual reality. A couple of advantages have been acknowledged by customers:

• Shorter project time because of better communication about the subject;
  
• Cost effective and flexible presentations compared to building a model or mock-up;
  
• Flexible presentation across various facilities. The software framework that Insight Services has been building in house over the last few years allows us to develop applications that can be used on most of our visualization facilities. Therefore it is possible to use the same applications from our CAVE in your office by using our passive stereo facility;
  
• Discovery of information in complex datasets which could not be seen before. For instance, microbiologists have discovered new phenomena by using the new possibilities of a high-resolution tiled display. The resolution of the current setup is 6400x4800 pixels.