The Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) opened on September 20th, 2006. It is a partnership between the State of Louisiana, the Lafayette Economic Development Authority (LEDA) and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. LITE houses a sophisticated set of technologies for immersive visualization, supercomputing, and interactive applications. A major component of our mission involves the nurturing of academic research facilitated through these technologies towards technology transfer to industry. As we open our doors, we are facing the lack of understanding about whether or not our technologies have practical applications in the industrial world, driven by university research results.To address this issue this presentation discusses a wide range of immersive visualization usability studies and evaluations performed by Dr. Cruz in the last 10 years. These studies have helped her to better understand the capabilities of the technology, its limitations, and identify where it has the potential to be very useful. Many of these studies have set many of today's national and international guidelines for the application of immersive visualization.
This presentation describes several of the critical studies performed, how they impacted the tech-transfer process and how they are defining our research directions. The presentation includes case studies from companies that are successfully applying immersive visualization in their production cycles as well as some of the struggles Dr. Cruz has experienced taking these advanced technologies into a production environment.