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Visualizing Data Inside the 30-ft Allosphere

Posted by timothy on Wed Apr 15, 2009 03:49 PM
from the bah-I've-seen-bigger dept.
Displays Science Technology
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."
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Submission: Visualizing data inside the 30-ft Allosphere by TEDChris (1476217)
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  • Just 360 degrees? Why not 420?

    • The volume controls go up to 11.

      The TED conferees pay big bucks, you don't want them to think they are just rocking out to the same Moody Blues laser show they've been seeing since 1975.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by rubycodez (864176)

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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by geekgirlandrea (1148779)
      Well, clearly, they meant 4*pi steradians anyway.

  • What is a USC Santa Barbara? (Score:5, Informative)

    by isBandGeek() (1369017) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @03:52PM (#27590859)
    I've heard of a UC Santa Barbara [ucsb.edu] and a USC [usc.edu], but I've never heard of a USC Santa Barbara.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by macraig (621737)

      Didn't you get the memo? All colleges in California are now just adjunct campuses of USC, by order of the Governator himself. He said he'd be back if it wasn't done.

    • Just wait until all the Gauchos find out they're going to have to live in Watts instead of Isla Vista.

  • Find people with powers? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Again (1351325) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @03:53PM (#27590869)
    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 [theinfosphere.org]!

  • IMAX? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by otomotopeia (1533291) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @03:57PM (#27590935)
    Seems like it's nothing more than 2 IMAX theaters tied together?

  • Amazing(not) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zerth (26112) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @03:57PM (#27590937) Homepage

    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) (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MadnessASAP (1052274) <madnessasap@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 15 2009, @05:05PM (#27591803)

      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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Dachannien (617929)

      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dave420 (699308)
      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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by inertia@yahoo.com (156602) * on Wednesday April 15 2009, @03:57PM (#27590939) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Penicillin and relativity come to mind? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheRaven64 (641858) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:00PM (#27590991) Homepage Journal
    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518)
      Of course there is no such story. Don't be silly. In fact, forget the whole thing...

    • From what I recall, penicillin was discovered by noticing that mould contaminating a bacteria sample caused the bacteria to die,

      And how do you think Flemming determined that the bacteria were dying? With a revolutionary new imaging system of course: his eyes.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by khellendros1984 (792761)
      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? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PolygamousRanchKid (1290638) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:26PM (#27591341)

      Before Einstein started scribbling stuff down on paper, he performed "thought experiments" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gedanken_experiment [wikipedia.org], 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.

        • 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 . . . (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PolygamousRanchKid (1290638) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:03PM (#27591033)

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Zerth (26112)

      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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tiro (19535) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:07PM (#27591083) Journal
    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 [powersof10.com] I saw in middle school. Remember that? I would much rather have watched that again.

  • No imagination... (Score:4, Funny)

    by iluvcapra (782887) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:07PM (#27591087) Homepage

    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.

  • ... 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by camperdave (969942)
      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? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Red Flayer (890720) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @05:07PM (#27591817) Journal
      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.

  • So, what kind of porn can you get on this thing?

  • Really Cool, But... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gpronger (1142181) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:19PM (#27591251) Journal
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hoplite3 (671379) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:23PM (#27591293)

    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Siberwulf (921893) on Wednesday April 15 2009, @04:23PM (#27591299)
    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.
  • I see the 3d sound capability as a differentiator vs merely a spherical screen. Dr Kuchera-Morin [ucsb.edu] is a musician after all.

  • Epcot Center has one of these...

  • It would be totally useless, but imagine the in depth visuals one could get with that.

  • 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".

  • 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.

  • Offhand, I thought of (in the following order):

    Meanwhile, in the non-fictional realm, the VR Lab at the University of Tsukuba (Japan) has been working for years on "Ensphered Vision" [tsukuba.ac.jp], complete with sound.

  • 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.

    • I am a scientist, and I agree.
    • 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

    • 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 ap

    • Well, for one thing, it would be hard to get twenty people into a sphere the size of a beach ball.

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