What were they originally designed for

COVISE – collaborative high end VR
SCIRun – computational steering, used to plug into AVS5 now has its own AVS/Express visualization system.

As a national service we use AVS/Express. Why?

It has a good user interface for beginners.
It has the QA and back up of coming from a stable company which only does visualization.
It is easily extendable.
Many academics already have access to it through CHEST.