Author: Carolina Cruz-Neira
Ph.D
Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira is the Executive Director and Chief
Scientist of the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise
(LITE). She is also an Endowed Chair in the College of
Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Until 2005 she was the Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary
Engineering, and the Associate Director and co-founder
of the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State
University (ISU). In 2002, she co-founded and co-directed
the Human-Computer Interaction graduate program at ISU.
Dr. Cruz-Neira's work in VR started with her Ph.D. dissertation: the design of the CAVE™ Virtual Reality Environment, the CAVE™ Library software specifications and implementation, and preliminary research on CAVE™-Supercomputing integration. She shares the recognition of the Invention of the CAVE with Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin. Since then, her research has been driven by providing applicability and simplicity to VR technology focusing on software engineering for VR, applications of VR technology and usability studies of virtual environments. She spearheaded the opensource VR API movement with the development of VR Juggler, and has been an advocate of best practices on how to build and run VR facilities and applications. Many of her former students are now doing leading work in VR at places such as Purdue University, Navtech, Nintendo, EA, Deere & Company, Boeing, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Argonne National Laboratory.
Beyond her academic career, Dr. Cruz is an entrepreneur.
She co-founded Infiscape Corporation, a services company
in immersive applications and high-end interactive graphics. She serves on many advisory boards, including Sensics
Inc and Micoy, and has performed corporate consulting in
many companies around the world. Business Week magazine named her in 1997 a “rising research star” in the new
generation of computer science pioneers. She received the
2000 Iowa State Foundation Award for Early Achievement
in Research. In June 2001 she received the Boeing A.D.
Welliver Award. In 2002 she was named Eminent Engineer
by the Tau Beta Pi Honors Society. In 2003 she was inducted
as a Computer Graphics Pioneer by the ACM SIGGRAPH
organization. Dr. Cruz has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) (1995) and a Master's degree in EECS at UIC
(1991), She graduated Cum Laude in Systems Engineering
at the Universidad Metropolitana at Caracas, Venezuela in
1987.
Publications
Co-authors
Productive Colleagues
- Michael R. Macedonia
- Ming C. Lin
- Anthony Steed
- 33
- 58
- 68
Publications
Steed, Anthony, Lin, Ming C., Cruz-Neira, Carolina (2009): Editor's introduction. In Computers & Graphics, 33 (1) pp. 21-22. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2008.11.007
Cruz-Neira, Carolina (2003): Computational Humanities: The New Challenge for VR. In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 23 (3) pp. 10-13.
Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Lindahl, Gary (2000): A Voyage into Virtual Reality: Networking our VR Lab to Iowa Middle Schools and High Schoo. In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 20 (2) pp. 16-19. https://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/cg/2000/02/g2016abs.htm
Roy, Trina M., Cruz-Neira, Carolina, DeFanti, Thomas A. (1995): Cosmic Worm in the Cave: Steering a High Perfomance Computing Application from a Virtual E. In Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 4 (2) pp. 121-129.
Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Sandin, Daniel J., DeFanti, Thomas A., Kenyon, Robert V., Hart, John C. (1992): The Cave - Audio Visual Experience Automatic Virtual Environment. In Communications of the ACM, 35 (6) pp. 64-72.
Sidharta, Ronald, Cruz-Neira, Carolina (2005): Cyclone Uppercut, a boxing game for an immersive environment. In: Lee, Newton (eds.) Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology - ACE 2005 June 15-15, 2005, Valencia, Spain. pp. 363-364. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1178477.1178549
Deisinger, Joachim, Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Riedel, Oliver, Symanzik, Jürgen (1997): The Effect of Different Viewing Devices for the Sense of Presence of Immersion in Virtual . In: Smith, Michael J., Salvendy, Gavriel, Koubek, Richard J. (eds.) HCI International 1997 - Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - Volume 2 August 24-29, 1997, San Francisco, California, USA. pp. 881-884.
Lozano, Miguel, Morillo, Pedro, Lewis, Daniel, Reiners, Dirk, Cruz-Neira, Carolina (2007): A Distributed Framework for Scalable Large-Scale Crowd Simulation. In: Shumaker, Randall (eds.) ICVR 2007 - Virtual Reality - Second International Conference - Part 1 July 22-27, 2007, Beijing, China. pp. 111-121. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73335-5_13
Hartling, Patrick, Just, Christopher, Cruz-Neira, Carolina (2001): Distributed Virtual Reality Using Octopus. In: VR 2001 , 2001, . pp. 53-. https://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/vr/2001/0948/00/09480053abs.htm
Arns, Laura L., Cook, Dianne, Cruz-Neira, Carolina (1999): The Benefits of Statistical Visualization in an Immersive Environment. In: VR 1999 , 1999, . pp. 88-95. https://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/vr/1999/0093/00/00930088abs.htm
Bierbaum, Allen, Just, Christopher, Hartling, Patrick, Meinert, Kevin, Baker, Albert, Cruz-Neira, Carolina (2001): VR Juggler: A Virtual Platform for Virtual Reality Application Development. In: VR 2001 , 2001, . pp. 89-96. https://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/vr/2001/0948/00/09480089abs.htm
Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Swartout, William R., Macedonia, Michael R. (2001): Tutorial 5: Virtual Reality for Fun and Profit. In: VR 2001 , 2001, . pp. 311. https://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/vr/2001/0948/00/09480311abs.htm
Just, Christopher, Bierbaum, Allen, Hartling, Patrick, Meinert, Kevin, Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Baker, Albert (2001): VjControl: An Advanced Configuration Management Tool for VR Juggler Applications. In: VR 2001 , 2001, . pp. 97-104. https://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/vr/2001/0948/00/09480097abs.htm
Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Sandin, Daniel J., DeFanti, Thomas A. (1993): Surround-screen projection-based virtual reality: the design and implementation of the CAV. In: Proceedings of the 20st Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 1993 , 1993, . pp. 135-142. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/166117.166134