September 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). EVL's introduction of the CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment in 1992, the first widely replicated, projection-based, walk-in, virtual-reality (VR) system in the world, put EVL at the forefront of collaborative, immersive data exploration and analytics. However, the journey did not begin then. Since its founding in 1973, EVL has been developing tools and techniques for real-time, interactive visualizations—pillars of VR. But EVL's culture is also relevant to its successes, as it has always been an interdisciplinary lab that fosters teamwork, where each person's expertise contributes to the development of the necessary tools, hardware, system software, applications, and human interface models to solve problems. Over the years, as multidisciplinary collaborations evolved and advanced scientific instruments and data resources were distributed globally, the need to access and share data and visualizations while working with colleagues, local and remote, synchronous and asynchronous, also became important fields of study. This paper is a retrospective of EVL's past 50 years that surveys the many networked, immersive, collaborative visualization and VR systems and applications it developed and deployed, as well as lessons learned and future plans.

In this article, we present our development of a virtual reality simulation of sailing on the Hōkūle‘a, a Polynesian double-hulled sailing canoe built in Hawai‘i in 1974, which completed its worldwide journey in 2017. The construction and sailing of this vessel is of significant importance to the Hawaiian cultural renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s; of particular relevance is Hawaiian wayfinding, the cultural practice of navigating across the open ocean to a destination without the use of maps or modern navigation instruments. By developing the simulation, we aimed to assist in the cultural preservation of the star navigation portion of Hawaiian wayfinding techniques, and to help to educate future generations of non-instrument navigators. The first implementation of Kilo Hōkū as a cultural heritage project in virtual reality was to test its viability as a tool for Modern Hawaiian wayfinders to use in classroom instruction, and its realism as an accurate reproduction of the Hōkūle‘a’s sailing experience. The reaction to the simulation from current practicing Modern Hawaiian wayfinders was positive, and indicates that further study is warranted in testing the efficacy of the simulation for teaching Hawaiian wayfinding to future navigators, as well as preserving and spreading knowledge of Hōkūle‘a and of Modern Hawaiian wayfinding beyond Hawai‘i.

This paper describes the design, evaluation, and lessons learned from a project involving the implementation of an immersive virtual environment for children called NICE (Narrative-based, Immersive, Constructionist/Collaborative Environments). The goal of the NICE project was to construct a testbed for the exploration of virtual reality as a learning medium within the context of the primary educational reform themes of the past three decades. With a focus on informal education and domains with social content, NICE embraces the constructivist approach to learning, collaboration, and narrative development, and is designed to utilize the strengths of virtual reality: a combination of immersion, telepresence, immediate visual feedback, and interactivity. Based on our experiences with a broad range of users, the paper discusses both the successes and limitations of NICE and concludes with recommendations for research directions in the application of immersive VR technologies to children's learning.