What is GVU?

Imagine controlling your TV and other home appliances simply by waving your hand. The Gesture Pendant, which recognizes and translates gestures into commands for a computer, is but one example of the innovative technologies taking shape at the GVU Center.

Or think about a computer that tutors children with the same seamless, individualized interaction they'd get from a human teacher, or 3-D animation so life-like you can't tell if it's real - then use it to put your virtual self into a video game.

The GVU Center gets its name from three key areas: graphics, visualization and usability. From those deceptively simple labels come an astonishing range of potential applications. What they have in common is the pursuit of technology that extends human ability to improve everyday life, and to do so in an intuitive, natural way.

Many ideas taking shape at the GVU Center are improvements on existing interests, like a house that automatically knows when it's you coming through the front door at night and not a stranger. Others represent entirely new approaches to solving everyday problems.

GVU's research portfolio enables unprecedented research and innovations from its faculty and students in health, home usable security, work, gaming, arts and entertainment, learning - and the list grows continually.

There is hardly a single human activity - personal or professional - that is beyond GVU's reach.

• Home - Researchers are inventing future technologies for the home that support individual activities and family pursuits.
• Health - New possibilities in healthcare are emerging, ranging from visualization tools for surgery planning to diagnosing and treating autism.
  Arts and Entertainment - With technology as their palette, researchers at the GVU Center are developing new approaches to the creative process.
• Gaming - Many sophisticated techniques in animation, human-computer interaction, augmented reality and other areas are provided a basis for new technologies for learning, simulation and, of course, games.
• Security and Privacy - The GVU Center is dedicated to investigating new ways of maintaining network security while preserving and even enhancing usability.
• Collaborative Work - By designing the physical and digital architecture of the information workplace, researchers are making work-life more effective, creative and energizing.
• Learning - Researchers are devising computational models that motivate, educate, advise and connect to help people of all ages improve their learning skills.

The GVU Center has earned an international reputation for its groundbreaking research in many areas:

3D Compression
Animation
Augmented Reality
Collaborative Work
Educational Technologies
Gaming
Graphics
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Visualization
New Media
Online Communities
Perception
Robotics
Ubiquitous Computing
Virtual Reality
Wearable Computing