Virtual Experiences Laboratory

We provide a space for students and industry to access advanced technology and expertise.

The VXLab supports simulated components in the cloud, virtualisation and telepresence.

Users explore collaborative experimental design, operation and testing of global cyber­physical systems.

For virtual and annotated reality, the VXLab includes advanced gaming and visualisation devices.

Capabilities

We support a broad range of industry applications including manufacturing, electronic engineering, information technology, analytics, games and medical imaging.

Specific use cases for the VXLab include:

• system design and testing research for industry partners with complex combinations of systems, design models and tests;
• access to remote or dangerous sites or labs;
• distributed, collaborative design, prototyping and troubleshooting requiring multiple views of complex data;
• prototyping and development of “dashboards” for decision making;
• management in automation systems, e.g. environmental management, building or cyber-physical infrastructure, incorporating maps and other custom views;
• high resolution and immersive imaging.

Equipment and facilities

• A Global Operations Visualization (GOV) Laboratory provides videoconference and streaming capability to remote sites combined with high resolution tiled display. The display is driven by a dedicated local display driver cluster compatible with parallel rendering middleware such as SAGE/SAGE2 and Google Liquid Galaxy.
• VXPortals provide large ultra-high resolution, stereoscopic 3D, mobile displays with human gesture-aware interfaces. Portals can be rapidly re-arranged to create different display layouts enabling a variety of interaction experiences.
• The Advanced Manufacturing Robot Interoperation Test (AMRIT) Laboratory provides industrial robot arms connected to the GOV lab, including sensors and cameras as “eyes on the robots”.
• Network connectivity between sites is supported by dedicated links and research software stacks.
• The Cyber-Physical Simulation (CS) Rack provides parallel cloud computing capability to support modeling and simulation.
• External cloud services access is provided transparently and includes connectivity to the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) cloud infrastructure and IBM's Bluemix under a special academic initiative.

Projects

Industry and select academic student projects are supported by the lab.

Activities include AICAUSE Collaborative Engineering and Collaborative Engineering 2 projects, and summer projects and student capstone programming projects in the School of Science.

Contact

Industry and research centres who wish to partner with or utilise the facility, please contact Dr Ian Peake.

Students wishing to use the facility should contact their lecturer or research supervisor.

Leadership and steering committee

• Director - Professor Heinz Schmidt
• Deputy director - Associate Professor James Harland
• Associate director - Associate Professor Stefan Greuter

Special expertise and/or user representatives are appointed to the committee from time to time.

If you are a user and wish to volunteer, please contact the lab manager, Dr Ian Peake, in the first instance.