Experiencing Infrastructures Sharing for International Research Activities S. Mottura 1 , M. Sacco 1 , R. E. Petruse 2 1 ITIA-CNR, National Research Council, Milano, Italy 2 Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania Abstract The Visionair Project aims at the creation of a distributed infrastructure of technological facilities in Europe as a visible, attractive entry point towards research and experimentation in high level visualisation, virtual reality and augmented reality fields, for hosting international researchers and giving them the opportunity of trying and practicing their ideas and their research topics. The infrastructure provides access to an extensive pool of visualisation services, including visualisation environments, leading visualisation software packages, post- processing resources and collaboration environments. ITIA-CNR, as partner of the Visionair Project, is providing access to its infrastructure, namely VirtualFactory, it has already hosted transnational accesses in its facilities and this paper presents them as an example of experiences that can be done by accessing the common infrastructure for research of Visionair. Categories and Subject Descriptions: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism- Virtual Reality; J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Architecture; K.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer Uses in Education-Computer-Assisted Instruction. 1. Introduction The Visionair Project aims at the creation of a infrastructure of technological facilities in Europe as a visible, attractive entry point towards research and experimentation in high level visualisation, virtual reality and augmented reality, for hosting researchers from all the countries by giving them the possibility to practice and try their ideas and their research topics. The infrastructure provides access to an extensive pool of visualisation services, including visualisation environments, leading visualisation software packages, post-processing resources and collaboration environments. Both physical access and virtual remote services are provided by the infrastructures. The accesses made by researchers to these facilities are called Trans-National Access (TNA) and the intended target of the TNA activities would be represented by researchers, professors, doctorate candidates that, for example: want to run their simulations on high-end visualisation platforms, want to do real time assessment of the simulation results during on-line simulations, develop novel post-processing methods or develop parallelised versions that require a large computing effort, need high definition/high resolution output devices, access virtual reality facilities for scientific research, share experience with virtual reality setups. The activity of TNAs, in terms of access and use of shared infrastructures, is in a context different from an international research project. In fact, the access to a specific facility is an on-demand access, in the sense that researches write a sort of short white paper summarizing the aim of their work and asking for a site with the proper infrastructure suitable for them. The infrastructure is represented by facilities (in terms of hardware devices and software tools) and by personnel that can give expertise for supporting the work. ITIA-CNR, as partner of the Visionair Project, is carrying on transnational accesses, two already done and other four are being scheduled for the coming period. The two concluded experiences have been done with the University of Sibiu, in Romania, and with the University of Delft, in Nederland. In this paper we present the experimental research activities that have been carried on at ITIA-CNR within the Visionair Project as an example of experiences that can be done by accessing the common infrastructures for research. 2. The E-Resources map A key element that allows the selection, the localization and of course the utilization of an infrastructure is the online map of the facilities belonging to the partners of the Project (Figure 1). The map is supported by an ontology data representation were the facilities as hardware devices, software tools and applications of every type are described. A potential visitor can browse, also by applying different filters, the map. Every element of the map comes with a description about what it is, its technical features and characteristics and of course at which institution it is located. Within the E-Resources map the ITIA-CNR facility has been identified as VirtualFactory, since the experience of the Institute in international projects related to the virtual manufacturing environments topics ([SDM*11][SPT10][VGMS11]) and it consists of 3D Conference and Exhibition of the European Association of Virtual and Augmented Reality (2014) G. Zachmann, J. Perret, and A. Amditis (Editors) c  The Eurographics Association 2014. DOI: 10.2312/eurovr.20141342