Interactive examples

RENCI pioneering the visualization industry with innovative interfaces

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Today I flew through a digitally enhanced simulation of an ear canal, looked at 3D manipulations of static 2D images, and watched a seamless video projected simultaneously on four surrounding walls. The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) is based in North Carolina and oddly enough it was my first visit to this extremely innovative and eye-opening interactive institute. Not only did it get me excited about information visualization, it gave me tons of inspiration for the future of immersive and interactive multimedia.

Here is a great overview video of a similar tour group that went through RENCI. I experienced the first two visualizations that are shown here:

RENCI has nine locations around North Carolina, and aims to provide solutions to and support for “high performance computing technologies, including parallel computing, visualization, collaborative tools, software engineering, networking, and data systems.” Some of their work includes multi-touch interfaces, dome 180-degree simulations, and 3D visualizations and manipulations of 2D content.

The first room I entered was the social computing room, which appeared to be a simple movie theater set-up. However, as soon as the lights dimmed images, documents, and videos were displayed on all four walls. The navigator is able to enlarge the content, drag it to any of the other walls, and otherwise manipulate the content. I believe they said the three projectors on each of the four walls enabled a total screen resolution of roughly 3,000+ by 768 pixels. When asked about potential uses for this interface, they said that professors enjoy bringing their students in to do immersive, second life experiments. One law professor conducted a mock trial in the room and had a judge virtually reenact a court room scene. Talk about the future of academia!

The second interface I experienced was a 3D wall, where 2D content could be projected on the wall and be brought to life with appropriate glasses and software. It really interested me in terms of photography because they took two relatively similar images, overlapped them and created a 3D space of the image. It was fascinating to see a static image of a street morph into a layered visualization, where I could see the space and depth between objects in the image. It reminded me of Microsoft’s photosynth, and it makes me think that this is potentially the future of photography. Think how much more storytelling is possible by giving a viewer a 3D image. They mentioned that ESPN will have a 3D channel by the end of the year, but that viewers will still be required to wear 3D glasses. I asked if it was possible to take the concept of the lenses and reenact it within the screen so that viewers didn’t have to wear obtrusive content, but they said that the technology isn’t there yet.

The last visualization room was the dome, where they projected content on a 180-degree wide circular screen. They said that a computer screen gives us roughly 50-degree field-of-view, so this dome more naturally mimics the viewing range that we see with our eyes. They said these simulations are extremely important for pilots, drivers, police officers, and other officials to conduct training sessions and drills without putting anyone or anything at risk. In one instance, they collected images of the London underground station to convert them into 3D models and then project it on the dome so security personnel could practice a terrorism drill.

If you live in North Carolina, I highly recommend visiting one of their nine facilities to see these visualizations for yourself. If you aren’t from around here, you can still check out their visualization work and learn more about their different focus areas on their Web site, as well as watch their video demonstrations on YouTube and check out their photostream on Flickr.

On my To-Do list now is to visit their Duke facility so I can see their 13×5ft multi-touch visualization wall:

Whether we are ready for it or not, flat computer screens and 2D images will soon be a thing of the past and these types of inventions will take their place. So what do you think about it? Do they just serve for a cool factor or do you think there is real potential in utilizing these interfaces to change the way humans interact with both digital technology and information?

Other posts that might interest you:

• Interactive media solutions for collaborative academia initiatives
• Cooliris plugin introduces an entirely new way to surf the Web
• Toyota launches user-submitted multimedia interface “Beyond Cars”

© 8 February 2010 Innovative Interactivity (II).