The field of Information Visualization is concerned with improving with how users perceive, understand, and interact with visual representations of data sets. Immersive Virtual Environments (VEs) excel at providing researchers and designers a greater comprehension of the spatial features and relations of their data, models, and scenes. This project addresses the intersection of these two fields where information is visualized in a virtual environment. Specifically we are interested in visualizing abstract information in relation to spatial information in the context of a virtual environment. We describe a set of design issues for this type of integrated visualization and demonstrate a coordinated, multiple-views system supporting 2D and 3D visualization tasks such as overview, navigation, details-on-demand, and brushing-andlinking selection. Software architecture issues are discussed with details of our implementation applied to the domain of chemical information and visualization. Lastly, we subject our system to an informal usability evaluation and identify usability issues with interaction and navigation that may guide future work in these situations. environment such as an iDesk or CAVE. It works by using XTest extensions in conjunction with input from DTK. In addition to the XWand program, there is also an XWand DSO that, when loaded into a DIVERSE application, can stop and start the navigation for the currently running application, giving the XWand program control over the navigation events. We used this program to allow users to toggle their interactions between navigation in the CAVE environment and selection in the 2D applet view. Event Communication and RMI messagingThe Diverse ToolKit (DTK) handles messages through its shared memory component. Snap handles interprocess communication within the JVM. Our project wanted to use both of these systems together but they do not mesh well together. If both systems were implemented in Java it would be easier, but DTK is a C++ toolkit. Our obvious first reaction was to use CORBA, but we decided this was overkill for the scope of the project that we were doing. We initially decided to try to allow two-way communication between Snap and DTK, but this also was beyond the scope of our timeframe. We decided to use the 3D world basically as a display-only environment that would allow the user to visualize information that they specifically chose from the 2D side of the world. We sent select messages based on molecules, atoms, and bonds from the Snap side of the world to the DTK part of the world.DTK then uses the primary keys that Snap sent over and further processes those. The specific way we implemented communication in Snap was by using three specially-fixed adapters. These adapters received Snap events and then used Java RMI to send the information back to a server that we setup to receive these RMI commands. This computer was enabled with a special DTK program written that Java could via an RMI invocation. By using the networking features of DTK, we were able to t...

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