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."

Comments

What is a USC Santa Barbara?

[isBandGeek()]

I've heard of a UC Santa Barbara and a USC, but I've never heard of a USC Santa Barbara.

Find people with powers?

[Again]

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.

Re:Find people with powers?

[Captain Splendid]

an awful looking hat.

You mean helmet. Heh. I just said 'helmet'.

Re:Find people with powers?

[NeoSkandranon]

build myself an awful looking hat.

Just steal a fedora from a kid trying to look stylish at the mall, much faster than building one yourself.

Re:Find people with powers?

[NeverVotedBush]

I just download the ISO... ;-)

Re:Find people with powers?

[hannson]

Well, everybody here's thinking it but I'm saying it:

Lets invest in the porn industry!!

Allosphere? Bah!

[Monkey_Genius]

What they need is the Infosphere!

IMAX?

[otomotopeia]

Seems like it's nothing more than 2 IMAX theaters tied together?

Amazing(not)

[Zerth]

So it is just two CAVEs stuck together? Yup, real advanced technology there.

I hope nobody tells them about head-mounted displays.

Re:Amazing(not)

[MadnessASAP]

That's what I was thinking. They could just buy some very high density LCD's and pay one of the engineerign students to spend a few weeks rigging them up with a motion detector and headphones? Uses alot less space, power and you get true stereoscopic vision. You would also get many different viewpoints for more then one perspective on the same dataset. In short it looks impressive at first but becomes a colossal waste of when you really think about it.

Re:Amazing(not)

[Dachannien]

Yeah, but head-mounted displays were Dominion technology. They were the bad guys. That's probably why the UCSB folks went with the astrometrics lab from Voyager (only better).

Re:Amazing(not)

[dave420]

It seems to be more about the software that represents the data in a visual/audio form than the displays, which as you note - are not fantastically exotic.

Mac vs. PC

[inertia187]

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.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is PC running Shatner OS?

Penicillin and relativity come to mind?

[TheRaven64]

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?

Re:Penicillin and relativity come to mind?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Of course there is no such story. Don't be silly. In fact, forget the whole thing...

Re:Penicillin and relativity come to mind?

[khellendros1984]

Einstein used to construct mental images, which often became the inspiration for his mathematical theories. For instance, a train traveling at c with a headlamp on the front...and somehow, the light from that is moving at c away from the train. From an external perspective, both the train and light beam are moving at c. Obviously, there's time dilation involved....at least, I was always told that he came up with that thought experiment.

Re:Penicillin and relativity come to mind?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Before Einstein started scribbling stuff down on paper, he performed "thought experiments" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gedanken_experiment, which are like a form of visualization. For instance, while he was at the Swiss patent office in Bern, he started to try imaging what the world outside would look like, if the street tram he was riding in, was traveling at the speed of light. He imagined that if traveling away from a clock, the hand would never move from his perspective.

No cats were injured in Einstein's experiments.

I'll have to pass on the penicillin, although I regularly "visualize" a form of it in my breadbox every week.

Re:Penicillin and relativity come to mind?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Simple, the ones who invested the millions of dollars required for this data visualization, failed to do the thought experiments necessary to see what a collasal waste of money it is was going to be.

It will definitely be a cash cow . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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!

Re:It will definitely be a cash cow . . .

[Zerth]

2 hemispheres made of rear-projector material, 2 projectors, 2 webcams, computer with dual video cards or one card with 2 ports.

Project a grid onto each hemisphere, use the webcams to distort the grid until it projects evenly across each hemisphere as viewed from inside(you'll lose some resolution at the edges).

Play quake until you vomit.

famous planetarium example

[Tiro]

I recently visited the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences. It's a new facility with impressive technology (and cost).

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.

No imagination...

[iluvcapra]

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.

Really Cool, But...

[gpronger]

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?

As a scientist

[Hoplite3]

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.

Solution Looking for a Problem

[Siberwulf]

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.

Re:360 or 420?

[rubycodez]

I would have expected just over a dozen and a half steradians myself.

Re:What is it for... owls?

[camperdave]

No, it is far easier to turn your head than to calculate and rotate an image, especially if you have more than one person that you're displaying for.

Re:What is it for... owls?

[Red Flayer]

Rotating the image into your field of view would destroy some of the spatial awareness of the data.

One of the points is for spatial awareness to more easily come into play when interpreting data.

Pretend you are a drug researcher, and you're working on developing analogues of naturally-occuring protein substrates. If you have a 360 model of the receptor site of the protein, being able to visualize the space your substrate fits into could help you identify possible analogues.

For an oversimplified example, look at epinephrine, which is a naturally occuring substance in the body that binds with adrenergic receptors and causes a response. Adding a methyl group in the right spot gives you a different compound that binds with adrenergic receptors more than epinephrine, but causes no response. Thus we have a compound that can be used as a drug to prevent that response. Or, maybe we can build a drug that increases the response.

Epinephrine drugs are well-understood... but there are many possible drugs that could be developed if we had better modeling and understanding of protein receptor sites. An encompassing 360 view of a receptor site could result in a breakthrough.

There are a ton of other ways this could be useful, that's just one example.

Re:360 or 420?

[geekgirlandrea]

Well, clearly, they meant 4*pi steradians anyway.

Hmmm, just like...

[meerling]

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.