| |
Press Room
Integrated Visualization Theaters:
Enabling Collaborative Analysis
Visitors to Scripps’ facility view topographic
data in three dimensions on Panoram Technologies’ display.
Cal-(IT)2’s two immersive visualization theaters established
at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and
San Diego State University (SDSU), linked by  an
optical network, comprise a new kind of infrastructure to
support collaborative scientific analysis, academic instruction,
and public education. Many such theaters exist around the
world, particularly in the oil-and-gas and manufacturing industries.
But these are two of the first such theaters that have been
networked together to support realtime sharing and collaborative
analysis of large-scale (including three dimensional) data
sets.
This infrastructure links lead campuses of the University
of California and the California State University in an unusual
experiment. It provides a neutral environment for vendors
to test their technologies and integrate them with others
in a real-world setting. And, in light of September 11, it
presages the possibility of networked command-and-control
centers for crisis management.
These facilities have been used to study:
• Integration of real-time Earth systems science data
related to southern California
• Seismicity from around the globe with a focus on active
faults in Southern California
• Surface topography of Mars for selection of future
landing sites
• Fault-related crustal deformation and subsurface fault
geometries
• Structure and dynamics of coastlines
• Impact of global warming on Earth’s climate
• Environmental change studies of the Caspian Sea
Potential applications are limitless . . .
Debi Kilb, science director of the Visualization
Center at Scripps, takes visitors on a virtual tour of Southern
California’s topography. This tour includes (image 2)
“flying” below the Earth’s surface to view
the locations of 40,000 earthquakes recorded by a Scrippsoperated
ANZA seismic network over the past twenty years.
These immersive visualization theaters are an early incarnation
of Cal-(IT)2’s vision of moving academic research prototypes
and industrial partners’ early products into the field
for system integration and testing. These "living laboratories"
provide an opportunity to experiment, revealing a glimpse
of future mass markets three to five years before the markets
themselves come into being.
Such labs enable participants—academic, industrial, and
governmental—to live in the future. Researchers can "plug
in" new algorithms and experimental devices to receive
immediate feedback. Industrial partners gain first-hand experience
with product prototypes and identify applications and services
that their new products may enable. Policymakers, business
management experts, cognitive scientists, artists, and educators
study the effect of this technology on human interaction,
expression and creativity, learning, and productivity. Students
are challenged by
this environment to become the nextgeneration research and
development leaders in telecommunications, information technology,
and driving applications such as the geosciences. (Early Cal-(IT)2
living laboratories include technologydriven, applications-driven,
and culturally driven labs, as described in pp. 5–14
of the Cal-(IT)2 brochure).
These immersive visualization theaters form part of Cal-(IT)2’s
LambdaGrid living laboratory. This lab is based on the emerging
concept of the grid, a set of network-connected, but geographically
dispersed, resources like computers, data servers, visualization
devices, and laboratory instruments.
Where previous network technology encoded information on a
single beam of light traveling on a fiber, now information
can be encoded on individual wavelengths of light—called
lambdas— with multiple lambdas able to travel along a
given fiber.
Such advances in fiber-optic technology are increasing potential
network capacity to the point where bandwidth ceases to be
the traditional bottleneck in connecting resources across
metropolitan and larger areas. This increased capacity is
beginning to support the next step in scientific investigation:
enabling geographically distributed scientists to explore,
interactively and collaboratively over large distances, massive
amounts of previously uncorrelated data.
The National Science Foundation recently funded a six-institution,
five-year research grant to develop the intergrated software
and hardware systems—termed the OptIPuter—necessary
to realize this vision.
Technical Specifications
Hardware components:
• TeraBurst Networks’ Wide Area Visualization Solution,
based on a high performance, optical networking platform to
enable transmission of massive amounts of data between multiple
locations. This technology enables video, audio, and data
to be transmitted simultaneously over a wide-area optical
network to geographically distributed centers.
• Panoram® GVR-120E curved, floor-to-ceiling screen
(8’6” x 28’4”) featuring 3.2-megapixel
resolution. The system is equipped with transmitters and LCD
shutter glasses, which permit stereographic 3-D viewing of
high-resolution images. Three
projectors use Panoram technology to blend the edges where
their video outputs meet. The immersive environment is well
suited for groups of up to sixty people.
• SGI® Onyx® 3400 visualization system, driving
the Panoram display, equipped with InfiniteReality3™
graphics, sixteen processors, and 1.5 TB of disk storage.
SGI also provides OpenGL Vizserver™ software, a method
of interconnecting visualization centers and remote devices
into a Visual Area Network. Visual Area Networking allows
anyone anywhere, anytime, on any device to connect to a central
graphics computer, to other participants in a decision-making
process, and to a full decision model in a command-and-control
center.
• Cox Communications’ 44-mile, 2.6-gigabit-per-second
opticalfiber network linking the two facilities. Cox Communications’
network link has the capacity to support multiple OC-192/10-GB
connections and provide voice and video connectivity.
• Microvision head-mounted displays that overlay data
sets on images of the physical world. These single- and full-color
laser systems allow output of the visualization system to
be sent to an individual on location (for example, a fire
battalion chief) so that critical information can be seen
in context. This technology also enables distinguishing between
“public” versus “private” displays of
multiple data sets on the big screen.
Software components:
• GOCAD, by ASGA. This program can be used to model,
view, and manipulate surfaces and natural objects, such as
oil reservoirs, especially in three dimensions.
• ARC products, by ESRI. New products support 3-D analysis
and fly through of world data sets related to security, environmental
planning and watershed management, and wireless locationbased
services.
• Fledermaus and Data Magician, by Interactive Visualization
Systems. Fledermaus enables the user to interactively explore
very large 3-D data from any angle or viewpoint. It allows
input of a wide variety of data types (including output from
many
Geographical Information System packages) and provides simple
graphical tools to convert these into color-coded and shaded
3-D scenes. Fledermaus allows draping or texture mapping of
imagery data over digital terrain models and provides a wide
variety of analytical tools.
• Volume visualization and decision-making software,
by Landmark Graphics. This software allows interaction and
realtime analysis of complex data sets displayed on the immersive
visualization systems.
• Focus 3-D, VoxelGeo, and GeoDepth, by Paradigm Geophysical.
Focus 3-D is a seismic-processing environment. VoxelGeo is
a volume-visualization environment that enables exploration
of large volumes of seismic data. It can produce QuickTime
movies for interpretation. GeoDepth is an imaging environment
that enables advanced velocity model building and imaging
in both time and depth.
• Extensible Information Systems, by Polexis. This software
provides the “glue” that enables multiple applications
and databases to interact with each other on a cross-platform
basis. It enables an enterprise to integrate relevant information
from many domains into one cohesive solution.
• GeoQuest, by Schlumberger. This software for oil/gas
exploration and production facilitates geophysical data processing,
display, and decision making.
• Amira and OpenInventor, by TGS. These software suites
support processing 3-D image data and displaying 3-D graphics,
which are compatible with immersive visualization systems
and real-time analysis, particularly in engineering, medicine,
Earth science, and manufacturing.
• Videoteleconferencing and software-based collaboration
applications connecting the facilities, by R.W. Welty Technologies.
Applications include computer, Web-based, and vendor-specific
capabilities for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration
and geospatial analysis.
Academic Research Units
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information
Technology
Graham Kent, left, and Frank Vernon, both of
SIO, discuss their data sets.The image behind Kent shows color-coded
bathymetry data of Lake Tahoe.The image behind Vernon shows
readouts from his network of seismic sensors in Anza, California.
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information
Technology (Cal-(IT)2) is one of four institutes funded through
the California Institutes for Science and Innovation (Cal
ISI) initiative. Created in late 2000 by Governor Gray Davis,
Cal-(IT)2 seeks to extend the reach of the current information
infrastructure throughout the physical world—enabling
anywhere/anytime access to the Internet. More than 220 professors,
senior researchers, and students from UCSD and UCI and more
than fifty industrial partners are collaborating on interdisciplinary
projects.
See www.calit2.net or contact Stephanie Sides,
Cal-(IT)2 Communications, ssides@ucsd.edu, (858) 534-5131.
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics
The Cecil H. and Ida M. Green branch of the University of
California Systemwide Institute of Geophysics and Planetary
Physics (IGPP) is located in La Jolla and linked to the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography (SIO) through joint faculty appointments,
research interests, and shared facilities. Other IGPP branches
are at the Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Riverside
campuses and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratories. IGPP research in La Jolla includes global seismology,
marine seismology and geodesy, geodynamics, high-frequency
seismology and arrays, geomagnetism, nonlinear dynamics, sea-floor
electromagnetic sounding, geodesy (including satellite geodesy),
geophysical fluid dynamics, geophysical inverse methods, acoustical
oceanography, marine acoustics, planetary physics, and physics
and oceanography.
For more information, see igpp.ucsd.edu, ROADNet.ucsd.edu,
and siovizcenter.ucsd.edu.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UCSD is one of
the oldest, largest, and most important centers for global
science research and graduate training in the world. Its mission
is to seek, teach, and communicate scientific understanding
of the oceans, atmosphere, Earth, and other planets for the
benefit of society and the environment. The scientific scope
of the institution has grown since its founding in 1903. A
century of Scripps
Download Printable PDF
|
|
