Cyber spelunking in the CAVE @ IUB

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Cyber spelunking in the CAVE @ IUB

Monticello middle schoolers check out IU’s IT

By Charles Rondot

Photos by Paul Martens
When a busload of students from Roosevelt Middle School from the northern Hoosier town of Monticello arrived on the IU Bloomington campus to learn about information technology Oct. 13, a team of IU employees were ready to show them all the sights worth seeing. Participants included John Huffman of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (pictured above at far right in the CAVE); Mary Ellen Anderson, director of the Office of Admissions; and Dennis Cromwell, director of University Informat ion Systems. The students (above) were taking a virtual tour of the IUB campus.

Inside Wrubel Computing Center

Students open IU goodie bags. The group finished off the day with a visit to the IU Bookstore in the Indiana Memorial Union.

Impressing a class of middle school kids isn’t an ea sy task these days. But once teacher Amy Masson’s 8th-grade computing class from Monticello’s Roosevelt Middle School set foot in Indiana University Bloomington’s CAVE (Computer Automatic Virtual Environment) at Lindley Hall, the wonder in their eyes was matched equally by crescendos of “cool!” and “wow!”

Kids who grew up with advanced video games and who have known about the Internet all their lives were awestruck at the three-dimensional environments with which they interacted. The room-sized CAVE, part of IU’s rich environment of distributed visual comp uting for research, boasts high-resolution, 3-D stereo imaging easily manipulated and modified by users.

From a 3-D campus tour in which students flew above trees and through buildings to experience IUB’s architectural wonders, to a virtual hands-on exploration of human brain anatomy, the kids were hooked on the technology and questions flowed freely and ent husiastically.

The visit Oct. 13, part of the field trip from Purdue country to learn more about information technology, included a campus tour, the CAVE experience, exploration of the Internet from one of IU’s advanced technology classrooms and a visit to University In formation Technology Services to see global networking supercomputers and high-performance facilities.

“Everything was wonderful. The kids loved the campus, the computers and working on the Internet, but their favorite thing was the CAVE. It was a great opportunity for the kids, and I’m sure it gave them some things to think about for the future,” said Mas son.

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Publication date: October 27, 2000
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