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NCSA, NLANR Featured at TechDay 2001

released April 10, 2001

Randy Heiland of NCSA's Visualization and Virtual Environments team demonstrates a molecular docking application on an ImmersaDesk for Illinois Gov. George Ryan. The demo was part of the 2001 TechDay at the state capitol.
Randy Heiland of NCSA's Visualization and Virtual Environments team demonstrates a molecular docking application on an ImmersaDesk for Illinois Gov. George Ryan. The demo was part of the 2001 TechDay at the state capitol.

Representatives from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) joined a number of Illinois' leading information technology businesses at the Illinois state capitol on March 29 for TechDay 2001.

The event, sponsored by the Illinois Coalition and the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, showcased the state's strengths in information technology, economic development efforts, and science and technology initiatives to key Illinois officials.

Kirk Hard, research and development program manager for NCSA, Randy Heiland and Bill Sherman, of NCSA's Visualization and Virtual Environments group, and John Estabrook, of NLANR's Distributed Applications Support Team (DAST), presented applications and visualizations on the ImmersaDesk, a portable virtual reality display system.

A number of state officials, including Gov. George Ryan and Philip J. Rock, chair of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, stopped by the booth to test the IDock molecular docking application. This application was developed for the DoD Programming Environment and Training (PET) program by Randy Heiland and colleagues at Ohio State University and Wright-Patterson Materials Laboratory. Also presented on the ImmersaDesk were Optiverse, a computer animated video that shows a new way to turn a sphere inside out, and Colliding Galaxies, an animation of gallaxy collisions created for the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage. Optiverse was developed by George Francis, of NCSA and the University of Illinois department of mathematics. Colliding Gallaxies is the creation of NCSA's Donna Cox and Robert Patterson.

TechDay 2001 offered NCSA and NLANR the chance to showcase their leadership in information technology as well as their support for the statewide technology initiative.

To read more about TechDay 2001, please visit the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs' Web page at http://www.commerce.state.il.us/.

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