Graphics Co-ordinator's Report

AGOCG have received funding from the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)Technology Applications Programme for supporting studies in 2 areas: virtualenvironments, and the area of overlap in interests of computing and audiovisual services. We are now firming up our plans for this part of AGOCG'sactivities.

Supporting Virtual Environments

We have just appointed Patrick Costello as the VR (Virtual Reality) SupportOfficer. Pat will be working with Professor Roy Kalawsky and his team inthe Advanced VR Research Centre at Loughborough University. He can be contactedat P.J.Costello@lboro.ac.uk.Pat will be supporting the community following the successful models ofthe other Support Officers employed to support visualization and multimedia(Steve Larkin and Sue Cunningham) and will be providing the deliverableswe are committed to in this first phase of the JTAP (JISC Technology ApplicationsProgramme ) project. These include:

a report on the availability of model databases for virtual environments
an evaluation of VR systems
a set of case studies describing the use of VR systems in researchand teaching.

World Wide Web (WWW) pages, e-mail support, courses and other reports willbe part of Pat's work. Keep an eye on the relevant AGOCG lists for details.Information will be circulated as soon as possible regarding activities.

Convergence of Computing and Audio Visual Services

We are planning to undertake a number of activities in this area. The firstof these is to be a survey of the management structures in institutionsfor these services. Other plans include a one day event in Spring 1997 toconsider good practices for equipping teaching facilities with suitableequipment for multimedia presentations. If you have any ideas for this thenplease let me know. We also intend to look again at digital capture to followon from the SIMA work in this area.

New AGOCG Reports

The following AGOCG Technical Reports are now available:

Supporting the Teaching of Computer Graphics, Visualization, Multimediaand VR Workshop Report - 28
Multimedia Presentations SIMA Workshop Report - 29
Graphics and the WWW Anne Mumford - 30

Please contact Joanne Barradell (j.t.barradell@lboro.ac.uk)if you wish to have a paper copy or see the AGOCG WWW site for an on-lineversion.

News from CHEST

We have heard that Stanford Graphics is to be frozen and not developed further.CHEST is currently (at the time of writing) investigating the situationregarding development and support. This is a major concern as the productseemed to satisfy a lot of requirements.

Contact CHEST or your local support staff for more details.

Knowledge Gallery

As reported last time, this is an initiative between the commercial sectorand HE to provide a gateway to image resources. If you think you have anysuitable content let me know.

Anne Mumford
a.m.mumford@lboro.ac.uk