November 12th, 2009
Top three Star Trek-style holodeck experiences
Surround 3D TV is making its way to your living room. To get a sense of what it may look and sound like, look no further than the cutting edge of virtual reality taking shape at academic research centers outfitted with world class data visualization facilities. In this post, we’ll take a look at three (ok, four) of the most remarkable scientific visualization technologies.
Allosphere: University of California, Santa Barbara
The AlloSphere is a spherical space in which immersive, virtual environments allow researchers to convert large data sets into experiences of sight and sound. For example, it allows researchers to “fly” through a hydrogen atom while hearing sonified features of the wavefunction of its single electron to help describe invisible processes of nature.
The facility consists of a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a 3-story cube that’s nearly echo-free. Inside the chamber are two spherical hemispheres that are constructed of perforated aluminum designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. A 7-foot-wide bridge runs across the center, supporting the users. High-resolution video projectors can project images across the entire inner surface enabling seamless stereo-optic 3D projection.
The Allosphere has more than 500 audio components that hang suspended in rings just outside the aluminum shell and are connected to multiple Gigabit Ethernet LAN fibers that lead to a server farm consisting of seven Hewlett Packard 9400 workstations (as of April 2009).
“The result is something far beyond other virtual reality systems such as a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) [to be covered next in this post] or a planetarium: 360 degrees of sounds and images in a chamber large enough to hold 30 or more researchers at once,” writes Scientific American.
It’s a place where you can use all of your senses to find new patterns in data, according to JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the AlloSphere’s director. “You can almost say researchers are shrunk down to the size of their data, immersed at a perceptual level.”
The AlloSphere was physically completed in February of 2007.
Resolution: 24 million pixels
Number of projectors: 14
Total lumens: 42,000
Sound system: 512 individual speaker elements (i.e. tweeters, woofers) plus subwoofer
Further reading: The Allosphere Research Facility, Scientific American
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Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer. Previously, he was the manager of marketing editorial at CBS Interactive, delivering client solutions on BNET, ZDNet, and TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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