Francis was a curator and contributor to the Calculart exhibit held in 2006 at the Krannert Art Museum. Calculart featured a variety of media focusing on art and mathematics and was the first curated exhibit of the CANVAS project, a joint effort between Beckman and Krannert exploring the relationships between art and science. CANVAS featured a three-screen, portable, virtual-reality lab based on CAVE technology for creating and presenting computer-assisted multi-dimensional projects. Francis said Calculart was a partial answer to the question of what is mathematical art.

"The idea was to build a virtual environment for artists," Francis said. "It was in the basement of Krannert and it worked. Artists used it for their own exhibits.

"It was not the first mathematical art show; I curated two previous ones in earlier years. But this one was built around the CANVAS and then we curated a small number of other pieces. Calculart was an obvious thing to do: a virtual environment studio for artists in an art museum."

Francis is also involved in a project with New York artist Tony Robbin, a self-taught mathematician, as well as sculptor, painter, and, like Francis, an exponent of the power of computers to create art. In the 1990s Robbin installed a large display called Coast at a university in Denmark. Coast was a 17-foot tall sculpture of quasicrystal colored and clear geometric shapes that produced remarkable visual effects of light and shadows. The display was later taken down and destroyed, but Francis suggested to Robbin that he recreate the piece - in silico.

"I said 'Tony this is really good art' and he said 'I'm too old to do this again' and I said 'no you don't have to do this again, we can do it in the Cube,'" Francis said. "Then he perked up, so we've been working on this for three years."

This is often where the expertise of Francis and his students comes in. The students work with already developed template programs which they then modify to create the software that makes a psychology experiment or artists' concept come to life in the virtual world.

"In order to reproduce this, somebody has to build a tool but that tool itself can become a product," Francis said. "So we envision a tool that Tony can use to design not one, but many of these displays. And because it's all virtual, he can place the latitude; it doesn't have to be in Denmark, it can be in Florida. And he can pick the season of the year when the sun goes over. This can all be simulated in the Cube.

"This is what that VITA proposal is all about. This is to enable artists to take high level information technologies, the stuff we have here at Beckman, and use it for themselves. How long is this going to take? Well it depends on a lot of lucky breaks and I need some students who are going to do this."

Over the years Francis' students have created perhaps 800 programs for use in platforms such as Silicon Graphics that power immersive virtual environments, as well as Linux and wiNTel platforms used at the U of I and on the Internet.

One of his former students, Ben Schaeffer, wrote the code (Syzygy) that powers the Cube and that can also be used for other platforms for PC and PC-cluster-based virtual reality environments as well as other graphical applications. Francis is proud of the fact that Syzygy, which continues to be updated by Beckman staff members, is free for the asking.

Schaeffer is but one of Francis' former students who have left deep footprints on the information technology landscape. Names like Mosaic and Netscape co-inventor Marc Andreessen, and PayPal co-inventor Max Levchin not only learned from him but were essentially student collaborators in Francis's nearly four-decade long scholarly advocacy of the power of computers to illuminate our world through education, research, and art.