Welcome to the Virtual Environment Laboratory at the University of Texas at Arlington.

The Virtual Environment Laboratory (VEL) is dedicated to performing research and development using Virtual Reality, Image Processing and Computer Vision technologies to further applications in Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical and Bio Engineering. We also sometimes take on interesting R&D work not confined to the above vision.

VEL houses multiple high end PC’s, four Sensable Haptic Devices together with the framework to hold long stemmed surgical instruments and a large suite of software products to assist in our research. Typically, on any given day, there are multiple graduate students at work.

Our past work has included Flight Simulation, Mission Rehearsal, Extraction of Design Features from CAD drawings, Laparoscopic Surgical Simulation, Design of Filters to See Through a Cataractous Eye, Generation of Data Bases for Surgical Simulations, Reducing Call Drops in Wireless Communications, Visually Guided Haptic Assisted Biopsy (Bio), etc. So far, 8 PhD dissertations and 50 MS theses have been written based on work performed by graduate students at the VEL and, one company, Imagecom Inc. ( www.aspire3d.com ), has been spun off.

VEL has been funded by NASA Johnson Space Center, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control Systems, Lockheed Martin Aircraft Company, Texas Instruments, Bell Helicopter, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, NIST, Imagecom Inc., L3 communications (both Greenville and Arlington) and others. We are grateful to all our sponsors.

We are always looking for topnotch PhD candidates to work on some of our projects. Please send email to venkat@uta.edu if you are interested.