GVIL History and Mission

The University of Maryland's Graphics and Visual Informatics Laboratory (GVIL) has been established in 2000 by the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies to promote research and education in computer graphics, scientific visualization, and virtual environments.

The mission of GVIL is to improve the efficiency and usability of visual computing applications in science, engineering, and medicine. The scope of this laboratory's research covers design of algorithms and data structures for reconciling realism and interactivity for very large graphics datasets, rapid access to distributed graphics datasets across memory and network hierarchies, and study of the influence of heterogeneous display and rendering devices over the visual computing pipeline. The activities of the laboratory involve development of visual computing tools and technologies to support the following research-driving applications: protein folding and rational drug design, navigation and interaction with mechanical CAD datasets, and ubiquitous access to distributed three-dimensional graphics datasets.