Wk05 - Elings Open House OR Review Assigned Paper

aimeejenkins
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:02 pm

Re: Wk05 - Elings Open House OR Review Assigned Paper

Post by aimeejenkins » Mon Dec 10, 2012 8:22 pm

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"Visualizing, hearing and exploring complex multi-dimensional data provides insight that is essential for progress in a number of critical areas of science and engineering." The Allosphere is a unique scientific instrument that supplies its audience with rich and compelling visualizations. Located in the California Nano Systems Institute building (Elings Hall) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Allosphere delivers rich, coherent, interactive, high-resolution 3D video and audio streams. It displays an extensive amount of scientific data in real-time. This 3-story cube is truly revolutionary and provides means for more complex and much varied research uses. 
The Allosphere, as a research tool, tests the visual capabilities of new technologies. With this instrument, scientists, artists, and engineers have complete control over their audience by manipulating variables with computer technology. Upon entering this virtual environment one is presented with a immersive landscape. As one travels through the landscape, viewing at a microorganism perspective, they find themselves immersed in scientific data to better understand it.

http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/
http://www.cnsi.ucsb.edu/visitor/maps/elings_1601.php

maerine
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:04 pm

Re: Wk05 - Elings Open House OR Review Assigned Paper

Post by maerine » Fri Dec 14, 2012 7:59 pm

While I was only able to go for a brief time, I was very impressed by what the Elings open house had to offer.

The first project that was demonstrated to me was by Danny Bazo. While I did not get the name of the project, it consisted of three cameras on tracks that could move back and forth and could “look” at whatever they wanted. Based on their programming they looked for things that they found interesting based on movement, lines, light, and change. While they seemed to just be moving slightly to follow the lines of the table in front of them, one of the cameras eventually honed in on my face and showed a picture of me with the edges of my nose and eyes marked with highlighted points on the screen that was attached to them. Danny said, “That one likes you”, which was a little unsettling, but very interesting notion that the camera could act on its own to record what it wanted to look at based on its “interests” and “memories”.

The second project that I looked at was the Allosphere, which put on one of the best displays of all of the projects. While I was a little skeptical of when they asked us to put on 3D glasses, I was glad to have been able to see some the effects that were possible by the Allosphere. Several computer displays were linked and blended on the sides and ceiling of the inside of the sphere. When looking up at the ceiling, one actually go the sense that you were going through the 3D object that was being projected instead of jutting out at you in the movies. Several applications for the allosphere were suggested, one of them being a tool for doctors to observe and treat an area such as the brain. Chemicals in the brain were color and sound coded and could be “grabbed” by the user and listened to to check their balances and health.

Image

A photo of what the cat scan of the brain looked like with chemicals as brightly colored blocks.

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