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Visualizing Data Inside the 30-ft Allosphere
TEDChris writes "The Allosphere, being created at UC Santa Barbara, is the most ambitious attempt yet at creating powerful 3d visualizations of raw scientific data, such as the structure of a crystal, or how quantum effects take place. Researchers watch from a bridge inside the 30-foot sphere, looking at data projected 360 degrees around them and listening to 3D sound. The first major public demo of the facility has just been posted at TED.com. Optimists would argue that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs happened through a new visual way of imagining data. Penicillin and relativity come to mind. So this is either a killer new research vehicle, an incredible toy, or just an insanely expensive art project."
Just 360 degrees? Why not 420?
I've heard of a UC Santa Barbara and a USC, but I've never heard of a USC Santa Barbara.
What I want to know is if it can find people with powers. If it can, then I need to build myself an awful looking hat.
What they need is the Infosphere!
I've got your sig, right here.
Just borrow the set from X-Men...
Seems like it's nothing more than 2 IMAX theaters tied together?
So it is just two CAVEs stuck together? Yup, real advanced technology there.
I hope nobody tells them about head-mounted displays.
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac.
PC: And ... I'm ... a ... PC.
Mac: Wow, PC. You're really slow today.
PC: Yes ... I'm ... running ... AlloSphere ... research ... for ... UCSB ... ... today.
Mac: What exactly is the AlloSphere useful for?
PC: Scientifically, ... it ... is ... an ... instrument ... for ... gaining ... insight ... and ... developing ... bodily ... intuition ... about ... environments ... into ... which ... the ... body ... cannot ... venture: ... abstract, ... higher- ... -dimensional ... information ... spaces, ... the ... worlds ... of ... the ... very ... small ... or ... very ... large, ... and ... the ... realms ... of ... the ... very ... fast ... or ... very ... slow, ... in ... fields ... ranging ... from ... nanotechnology ... to ... theoretical ... physics, ... from ... proteomics ... to ... cosmology, ... from ... neurophysiology ... to ... the ... spaces ... of ... consciousness, ... and ... from ... new ... materials ... to ... new ... media.
Mac: Wow, that ... that sounds pretty amazing.
PC: It ... is.
Mac: Anything else?
PC: 42.
Mac: What does that even mean?
PC: I ... have ... no ... idea.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Really? From what I recall, penicillin was discovered by noticing that mould contaminating a bacteria sample caused the bacteria to die, and relativity came straight out of the mathematics (you can derive special relativity in about one sheet of A4 - general relativity is much harder). Is there some story that everyone except me knows about?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So this is either a killer new research vehicle, an incredible toy, or just an insanely expensive art project.
It's entertainment! It sounds like a great source of revenue to me. Charge admission! Team up with The Discovery Channel and whip up some fascinating images with insightful commentary! Scientists love showing off their research to awed folks who can't really comprehend it.
I want one! I can't wait for the Slashdot article that describes how to make a cheap, open source version of this!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
However the presentation was all animation, moral harangues, and celebrity voiceover, with little content and no interesting astrophysics science. The whole concept seemed like a watered-down ripoff of the powers of ten video I saw in middle school. Remember that? I would much rather have watched that again.
So this is either a killer new research vehicle, an incredible toy, or just an insanely expensive art project.
All three, you got the superego, the id and the ego all in one machine.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
... a LAN party with a cluster of these!
Human beings only have about a 120 degree maximum field of view, so 360 degrees isn't that useful. It is easier to rotate the image into your field of view than to turn your head 360 degrees to see it all, IMHO.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So, what kind of porn can you get on this thing?
This is my sig.
Trying to think outside the box while stuck in box in a sphere....
I am a scientist, and I agree.
Currently hooked on AMP
My guess is that it will be seen as an impressive technological feat, with marginal real applicability.
In the talk on "TED" JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, trumps the ability to fly into the brain, see the tissue as landscape and hear the blood density as sound. It is very unclear the advantage of the projection to the scale they've accomplished (other than to say we've done it).
They've pulled together impressive super-computer technology, but if it was on a larger PC screen versus a "walk-in" version, is there a real gain?
It sounds like a cool toy, but choosing the correct way to visualize data is really hard. Generally, picking which quantities to plot against each other corresponds to taking a lower dimensional slice of a data set. Picking the right slice isn't just difficult, it's a really important result of the research.
There have been lots of advances in trying to automatically determine these sorts of reductions (the Netflix recommendation contest brought a lot of this to public attention), but for many problems, the "interesting" lower-dimensional space that's plotted corresponds to some important symmetry of the data.
I guess what I'm saying is that in science (like in art) limitations sometimes help guide useful thinking. Just seeing "everything" in 3D 36 degrees with more dimensions represented as sound doesn't necessarily help that.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Honestly, it seems rather useless (in these examples). I won't knock music in general, but does a computer singing a song really going to be helpful in diagnosing something? Just because you have more information, doesn't mean you have any higher level of useful information.
I will give the presenter props though. That was like a Science Word Bingo caller going for blackout.
If 3D visualization is that helpful, is being immersed within the scene really that good of an idea?
Assuming they can avoid being goatse trolled, yes. Otherwise the thing will be burned down quickly.
A lot of 3d data doesn't really work well on flatscreens. I take confocal microscope images, there are plenty of tricks to convey the 3d, like causing my movies to wobble, but when there's a lot of noise it's tough to keep track of it. Maybe this would help. Of course, the images don't look really good when I blow them up to full monitor, at 30 feet they would become just downright ugly. I'm sure other applications though really are hurting and resolution would be just fine.
I see the 3d sound capability as a differentiator vs merely a spherical screen. Dr Kuchera-Morin is a musician after all.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
Epcot Center has one of these...
It would be totally useless, but imagine the in depth visuals one could get with that.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The USGS and the oilfield companies could use this to their advantage, predicting major events, to computing more precise strike points for drilling, reducing the chance of having a "dry hole".
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Yeah, penicillin required looking at a petri dish, but I'm not sure that counts as "visualization".
Einstein apparently was a visual thinker, but the emphasis there is on "thinking", not plotting, graphing, or other artifacts; visual thinking in mathematics is very different from 2D or 3D data visualizations.
Early reports indicate that the facility is also useful for tracking down mutants.
Agreed.
I just saw the vid and I was not impressed. I don't see how this offers you anything other than what essentially amounts to a giant monitor, unless you go through pains to condition your data to the Allosphere specifically... and I've got to imagine conditioning data at every iteration and every step of your analysis for one particular view inside an Allosphere is not worth it. The data almost certainly doesn't just know how to present itself on a 360 degree plane (I'm not a mathematician, but I think this would still be considered to be a 2D plane?) which would take advantage of the viewpoint characteristics the Allosphere could offer.
It's got a pretty cool name though.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Meanwhile, in the non-fictional realm, the VR Lab at the University of Tsukuba (Japan) has been working for years on "Ensphered Vision", complete with sound.
So when do scientists plan on researching visualization hardware that is forward compatible so that we can observe 1:1 preview samples of the next generation of hardware. The article presented yet another video of an amazing visualization device that I cannot comprehend on my tiny computer display or my HD television set. At least on PBS they try to explain the future with diagrams depicting how it is suppose to work.
The first thing I read when I skimmed the headline was "Visualizing Data Inside the 30-ft Allosaur".
I can't be the only one who thinks it would be cool to somehow store data inside dinosaurs.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
My company was on the design team for the AlloSphere. After listening to the ideas they wanted to express in this "venue" we took our planetarium experience and turned it on it's side. (pause for groans) To help visualize/demonstrate the idea, we found an old globe lying around, cut it in half and glued an extra long scale rule in the middle as the audience platform. While I can't speak to how they are using it today, at the time we conceived it it was pretty radical. We looked at all kinds of immerse technology, including CAVEs, small planetarium domes and plain old curved simulation screens and there was nothing you could get 20 or so researchers in at the same time and have everyone in the sweet spot. One really has to look at it from the starting point of a planetarium, not Starry Night on a flat screen. I have not been in the thing since it's been commissioned but I look forward to hearing what the multichannel sound system does.
OMG it's the blueprints to the deathstar. We need to analyze these for potential weaknesses.
Before you mod me off topic, please watch the video intro.
Well, for one thing, it would be hard to get twenty people into a sphere the size of a beach ball.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The real question: Would this "flying" through the landscape of data be called Allosoaring?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Simple, they always have two researchers standing back to back, so that all 360 degrees are covered. That way, there's never any chance of anything sneaking up behind them and stealing their funding.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
A multi-story, round room with a bridge in the center used to display 3-dimensional scientific data? Where have I seen this concept before?
I tried to watch the presentation but had to stop because of the nauseating stream of peseudo-technical nonsense that this woman is spewing.
She's the "inventor of the Allosphere" - the "dynamically varying digital microscope" where the "researchers interact with data by injecting bacterial code" and defy quantum mechanics by showing "where the electron is at any given point in time and space".
Why not just describe it for what it is - a spherical projection screen for visualizing scientific models.
The coolest computer monitor in the world.
Yep. This sphere brings no new capabilities, SGI used to build stuff like that back in the '90s.
No sig today...
Not exactly a new concept, just new in that somebody actually built one.
This kind of thing has been in Sci-fi for ages, everything from Star Trek to X-Men.
some 3d glasses are not cool enough for these folks.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Makes me think of black mesa..
We MUST stop this
Now *THIS* sounds cool!
What would make the whole setup complete would be to develop a camera that can take spherical images. They can buy an unmanned drone ( or better yet, build their own) and take flying spherical video!
I would definitely line up to pay $$$ for a 10 minute "flight" over the Midwest or Sierra Nevada.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
There has been some interesting progress in visualizing some of the interesting (or spooky) quantum mechanical effects. http://visualphysics.org The software which generates it is available for free. It uses mathematics based in Quaternions to visualize the mathematics behind spacetime, standard model groups,etc.
CAVE-type displays (you're surrounded by rear-projected screens) have been around since 1992. Mechdyne (which bought FakeSpace) makes a number of variations on this theme. Their standard CURV display can be purchased in sizes up to a full hemisphere. A full sphere would be a custom order.
The new California Academy of Sciences building has a "planetarium" which is really a 75 foot dome equipped for full digital projection over slightly more than a hemisphere. There's a writeup in Maximum PC.
has a cool little motion detecting LCD setup next to the elevators. (I still haven't figured out if this Allosphere thing is in UCSB or USC)
Is Professor Charles Xavier behind this project?
-Eric
That would be roughly 9 meters.
As in the device in the X-Men movies?
so that is what 3DRealms awaits for!!!
Dr. Kuchera-Morin is primarily an artist. She's truly interested in doing what she says in her TED talk, which is bringing all disciplines together to share knowledge, but she originally imagined the Allosphere as the ultimate multimedia theater. The artistic computer music community (especially the people in the MAT program, which she directs) are heavily into spatialization using a large number of loudspeakers and the Allosphere will facilitate such art presentations. If scientists can get some use out of it, all the better, but I sense (I really don't know) that she pitched the Allosphere to UCSB's world-renowned physics department in order to get funding. She's been talking about the Allosphere since the founding of the MAT program (1999 I think), and I still don't know how she did it.