[Philip Lelyveld comment: the Allosphere is a walk-in 3D video, 3D audio fully immersive interactive environment at UC Santa Barbara]
[The Bottom Line]
“This is kind of like where video gaming meets high-performance computing,” said Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin as she led awestruck onlookers through the AlloSphere, a virtual environment housed in University of California Santa Barbara’s Elings Hall.
The AlloSphere, which is a product of 26 years of Kuchera-Morin’s research and labor, is a spherical, three-story anechoic chamber that uses multiple projectors, speakers and a super computer to visually and sonically represent data. The multi-sensory display that characterizes the AlloSphere is derived from complex mathematical algorithms mapped by Kuchera-Morin and teams of researchers, and has been. …
The AlloSphere is not merely a demonstration; it offers an immersion of a highly complex mathematical visualization and anatomical data that would be frustrating for scientists to explore otherwise. …
The AlloSphere will be featured in the annual Media Art Technology End of Year Show “Bits and Pieces” on Tuesday, May 29 from 6 to 9 p.m. Those in attendance will have the opportunity to tour the instrument, which is rarely exhibited because it costs about $3,000 an hour to run.
“We’ll have all of our labs open and all of the Ph.D.’s will be exhibiting their work. We’ll show the AlloSphere as well. We’re anticipating hundreds of people,” Kuchera-Morin said about the annual display.
See the full story here: http://thebottomline.as.ucsb.edu/2012/05/allosphere-leads-the-way-in-integrated-multimedia-systems-research