VISIT exploits the tremendous growth in network capacity to prototype and deploy highly immersive collaborative environments across the University of Michigan campus and with partner institutions. High performance network links support the real-time and low latency transmission of high definition video streams and allows these streams to be rendered on extremely high-resolution tiled displays called OptIPortals. These OptIPortals serve as termination devices for a distributed computing facility called the OptIPuter. Connecting to other OptIPuter sites allows us to assemble a variety of collaboration and visualization resources.

VISIT leverages similar advances in computing to build novel interaction environments. High performance cluster computing is a critical building block for our ultra-resolution collaboration systems, providing highly scalable computing power for our demanding applications. Similarly we rely heavily on visualization and computing toolkits to develop novel interaction techniques and interfaces.