Virtual environments provide greater immersion into the world or environment of scientific data, thereby enhancing the researcher's perception of its features and forms. However, access to laboratories with appropriate hardware for providing the immersive environments is currently limited. Virtual environment lab access may be infrequent, and of limited duration for most scientists. To make the best use of that time, he or she will want to spend as much of it as possible, actually looking at their data, and not debugging the virtual world source code. In an effort to get the scientist close to achieving this goal, we have developed software to emulate a suite of standard virtual environment hardware devices.
Emulated hardware is designed such that it is indistinguishable to the application software.
Other, more macro, devices such as the CAVE designed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, can be built on top of the basic emulation devices. We are now making efforts to have virtual environment programmers use them to design and test applications without using much of the increasingly precious time in the NCSA Virtual Reality Laboratory. These tools are also useful in educational settings, and for sites where visitors will come to use the lab for short intense periods. In the classroom situation, all students could be testing and debugging code, while individual students are given short periods of time to use the actual hardware. Remote users could have the bulk of their applications running even before arriving in the host city.