VENUS

Introduction CERN exists primarily to provide European physicists with accelerators that meet research demands at the limits of human knowledge. In the quest for higher interaction energies, the laboratory has played a leading role in developing colliding beam machines. The next research instrument in Europe's particle physics armoury is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a project similar in duration and budget size to a huge off-shore drilling platform [I]. In keeping CERN's cost-effective strategy of building on previous investments, this new equipment is designed to share the 27-kilometer tunnel of the existing Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP), and be fed by existing particle sources and preacceleratars. CERN is about to start building the LHC, which at its completion in the year 2004, will be the world's largest machine for high energy physics. The LHC wil l require huge investments in effort and funding from all the CERN member states, and it is of capital importance that each single aspect of this huge project can be analyzed in every little detail, so that errors in the design of the premises and equipment can be determined as soon as possible.This will require the most efficient organization and technology at every stage of the design process. In order to evaluate and promote the use of virtual environment technology as a tool to help design, build and maintain the LHC premises and equipment, a pilot project was started in January 1994 by the Computer & Network and the Accelerator Technologies Divisions, under the name VENUS (Virtual Environment Navigation in the Underground Sites). In order to respond to the needs of LHC designers and engineers, theVENUS project is composed of the following applications: