released 01.06.12

A growing collection of debris is orbiting the earth, creating hazards that jeopardize both space exploration and the satellite network that powers modern communication systems. These cluttered orbits are the subject of the new film "Space Junk 3D," which features data-driven scientific visualizations created by NCSA's Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL).

"Since no actual images exist of the most spectacular orbital debris events," explains director Melissa Butts, "we set out to recreate them with scientific accuracy and mind-blowing visualization."

Building on previous animations developed for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope project , AVL created two sequences based on scientific data from computer simulations. The first shows the evolution of filamentary structure in the early universe, using data from Princeton astrophysicists Renyue Cen and Jeremiah Ostriker. The second features a dramatic collision of galaxies created based on simulations conducted by Brant Robertson at the University of Arizona.

"Not only is it cinematic, but it's in 3D, and it's pretty powerful to see these galaxies coming at you, and filling the screen and the room," Butts says.

The AVL team designed these scenes using their ultra-high-resolution 3D visualization environment and two key pieces of software they have developed: Virtual Director for interactive scene design and Amore for rendering both volume and particle data. They also used one of NCSA's supercomputers to complete computationally demanding tasks by the production deadline.

"It's a real treat to be asked to participate in the making of 'Space Junk 3D'," says Bob Patterson, AVL senior research artist. "It's an opportunity to contribute cinematic scientific visualization to a giant screen science documentary to tell the larger story of natural phenomena in the cosmos."

"Space Junk 3D" opens beginning Jan. 13 in IMAX® and other giant screen theaters in 2D and 3D.

"Space Junk 3D" is presented by Melrae Pictures, in association with Red Barn Productions. Produced by Melissa Butts and Kimberly Rowe. Distributed globally by K2 Communications, the 38-minute film is available in both 3D and 2D, for Giant Screen and Digital Theaters. For more information, including theater locations, see www.spacejunk3d.com .

AVL team members
Donna Cox
Robert Patterson
Stuart Levy
Matthew Hall

Cylinder and stamp seals played an important role in the legal and social culture of ancient Mesopotamia. These small stone or shell cylinders, usually no more than an inch long, were carved with a unique design to act as the equivalent of an owner's signature. They could then be rolled over the surface of a tablet to make an impression in the wet clay.  For centuries, this was the only practical way to see the various inscriptions carved on the seals. Technological innovation has allowed archaelogists to view these ancient seals in a new way. Using a specialized panoramic digital camera to take 360° images of the surface, researchers and archivists are able to discover new revelations about the artistry of the seals.

Using these images, eDream artists are working with museum staff to create an interactive kiosk exhibit to showcase some of these new discoveries.

The exhibit will include an interactive game designed to help visitors explore the various characters on the seals and identify animals & archetypes within "conflict scenes"

Members of the Illinois Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute (eDream) and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with Obie-winning experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison on "The Great Flood," a 75-minute multimedia work of original music and film inspired by the 1927 Mississippi River floods, creating data-driven visualizations of the Mississippi River Valley showing the extent of the destructive floodwaters.

"In 1927, the Mississippi River surged over its banks after heavy rains the previous summer set it pawing at its limits by the time the 15-inch downpours of April hit. Levees across the Midwest and the plains failed, as water pummeled communities along the shores. A mass exodus downstream carried the Delta blues northward, where it would become rock and roll."

Performance description from Krannert Center
Full NCSA Press Release
"The Great Flood" preview

The Illinois-Japan Performing Arts Network (IJPAN) uses advances in new media technologies to bring together Japanese performers, scholars, and audiences from across the physical distances that have too often kept them apart.  Through enabling this global cultural exchange, IJPAN celebrates pre-modern, modern, and contemporary Japanese music, dance, and theater. 

In practice, IJPAN combines the University of Illinois’s emerging technology capabilities (led by Guy Garnett, eDream Institute and Cultural Computing Group) and the academic cultural expertise of faculty (led by David Goodman, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures) with the programming strengths of the Japan Society in New York (led by Yoko Shioya, Performing Arts Director).  The Network’s seed funding has been generously provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

IJPAN’s External Goals:                                                                     

1.        Participate in the expanding number of global performing arts networks worldwide.

2.        Disseminate interactive performing arts programming via the internet, television, and digital media to sites around the world.

IJPAN’s Internal (U Illinois-Directed) Goals:

1.        Build on the expertise of Illinois Japan studies faculty to develop interactive programs in premodern, modern, and contemporary Japanese music, dance, and theatre using digital new-media technologies. 

2.        Integrate performing arts exchanges and collaborations with Japan into the curricular and research programs of East Asian Studies, Music, Theatre, Computer Science, Art and Design, and other departments at the University of Illinois. 

3.        Institutionalize the Japanese performing arts and interactions with Japanese performing artists as an integral and ongoing part of research and teaching at the University of Illinois and other institutions in our worldwide network.

Call for Participation

IJPAN is actively seeking creative and technical collaborators to participate in, contribute to, and help support interactive, networked performances; workshops; and streamed internet broadcasts for 2010-2012.

Contacts

David Goodman and Guy Garnett / ijpanproject@illinois.edu

with A. Colin Raymond and Ben Smith

Author / Editors: Donna Cox, Ellen Sandor, and Janine Fron

In Prairie Futures, we tell the story of women working in digital arts media who made essential contributions to the major global technological revolution that started in the Midwest around 1985, helping to catalyze what we now think of as the Information Age.  This revolution includes seminal events at the University of Illinois and in Chicago, converging at an intersection in social feminist change, advanced academic technologies, and the Chicago art scene.  Digital gaming, virtual reality, supercomputing graphics, and internet browser-based art all emerged from this convergence.

Sally Rosenthal's famous demonstration of
NASA VR Technologies

We mark 1985 through 1991 as a threshold period of technological progress on the prairie, with a surge in innovation from then onward.  In national terms, for example, 1992 was a year when 3D graphics in games began to enter the mainstream (e.g., a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign alumnus co-developed Mortal Kombat), while in 1994 Microsoft débuted at SIGGRAPH (the ACM Special Interest Group in Graphic Arts continues to be a major meeting in the field).  In Midwestern terms, 1992 was the year the CAVE was born at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Lab; two years later, Netscape (developed at NCSA as Mosaic) had its initial public offering, becoming the first widely used, graphics-based browser.  Author / editor Donna Cox was fortunate to be creating in the thick of it, working in the area of scientific visualization and emergent technology.  Also in that time in Chicago, (art)n (a digital arts media artists’ collective) was involved working with Spielberg  and testing digital medical applications in hospitals as real, applied products.  Author / Editors Ellen Sandor and Janine Fron were also there, helping to create and lead in the digital arts.  Kelly Searsmith rounds out the authorial / editorial team as a humanities scholar working to help shape the future of digital arts media programming in higher education.

In conducting our research on these historical developments, we are recording interviews with pioneering women whose stories extend from the fertile Midwestern art/scientific environment during WWII to our present day digital cultural experiences within the arts, science, and entertainment.  Interviews we have completed are with Martyl Langsdorf (designer of the famous Doomsday Clock), Carolina Cruz-Nera (co-inventor of the CAVE and a leading engineer and education still vital in the field), Brenda Laurel (one of the first women in video gaming and a leader of the independent GRRL gaming movement), Joan Truckenbrod (School of the Chicago Institute of Art Professor, artist, and author of the pioneering book Creative Computer Imagining, 1988), Claudia Hart (a feminist 3D graphics and subversive gaming artist, and Faculty, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and Maxine Brown (Associate Director of EVL, leading organizer and theorist of the digital arts technologies).  Each woman is placed on a timeline of evolution in arts, technology, feminism, and world history–from a period when no women were mentioned as major contributors in art history books to today, when women play significant leadership roles in major institutions in digital media.  These digital pioneers became drivers as well as adopters of new technologies, and their migratory patterns have shaped much of what we recognize as the new digital media in visual and performative art today.

Emerging digital media and its foundations are of significant academic and historical interest.  Several recent scholarly books expand upon important digital art developments (such as Edward Shanken’s valuable Art and Electronic Media: Phaeton, 2009 and Judy Malloy’s Women, Art & Technology: MIT Press, 2003).  However, they lack the important social and technical connections among digital pioneers in the Midwest (see the eDream Institute’s timeline of contributions here on campus as a foretaste)–especially the stories of the contributions of women.  Our approach, we believe, is unique because we are revealing a little-known synergy between individuals and institutions, global migratory patterns and the impact of pioneering efforts from Midwestern women’s points of view.

Roy Campbell (Computer Science) and Guy Garnett (Music / eDream)

Collaborators

NCSA's Robert McGrath and Mary Pietrowicz

Students

Ben Smith, Brett Jones, Raj Sodhi, Tony Reimer, Stephen Lett, AJ Christensen

The mWorlds project will integrate research in virtual world creation tools and shared, persistent, digital environments with NCSA's expertise and technology in collaborative computing and cyberenvironments. The end result will be the beginnings of an extensible open source framework for building shared, persistent, highly scalable 3D virtual environments that will be suitable for a wide range of applications from the sciences, to education, to the arts.

Unlike commercially available virtual worlds such as Second Life and Active Worlds, mWorlds will provide support for a variety of input devices: from environmental sensor nets for scientific simulations to motion tracking devices in dance performance. It will also support scientifically accurate simulations and visualizations and operating with large-scale datasets in distributed computing environments.

A key design goal is to make it possible, even easy, for non-specialist users to create or customize their own virtual world without having to leave the virtual world environment, and to maximize the capability to communicate objects, avatars, and behaviors between such worlds. Our goal therefore is to create tools for developing virtual worlds that would make such resources as easy to use as the world wide web. Such virtual world building tools are also important for educators to be able to create context specific virtual worlds for collaborative, experiential learning. NCSA's MMOLES (Massively Multiuser Online Learning Environments) project is another application area that we intend to actively collaborate with.

This project is part of a collaboration of researchers from many departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The fellowship will build on NCSA's cyberenvironments and cyberinfrastructure, and will create new environments for collaboration, computing, and creativity.

Date Oct 31, 2011
Time 4:00 pm  
Location 2405 Siebel Center
Sponsor CS @ ILLINOIS and eDream

In terms of aesthetics, CG character animation has become a victim of its own success.  Twenty years ago, recreating human beings in virtual 3D space was a fantasy, a “Holy Grail” of computer animation.  Today, that fantasy is a reality that surrounds us in films, games, and even TV commercials.   The modeling, animation and rendering of characters as photorealistic human substitutes has become almost commonplace in popular culture.  But, an unintended side effect of this success is that audiences are largely alienated from, not attracted to, these characters.  This seeming paradox is often called the “Uncanny Valley”.  

The Uncanny Valley is a consequence of a very basic but incredibly refined human acuity–perceiving honesty, or the lack of it, when we observe people.  The photorealistic characters in many contemporary CG-animated films are not honest.  They pretend to be real humans, but we can feel that they’re not:  their eyes don’t move properly, their movements are slightly too fluid.  We instinctively realize we’re being hoodwinked, and we stop trusting.

About Chris Landreth
Chris received an MS in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois in 1986; but before long, the siren call of Art beckoned.  So in 1989,  Chris studied Computer Animation under Prof. Donna Cox, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).  This period of time doomed Chris to a lifetime obsession with this field.

*Full press release here
Watch the video

Experts talks: Donna Cox from Quantum Cinema on Vimeo.

eDream director Donna Cox speaks to Quantum Cinema about the role of scientific visualization, the importance of „Vizaphors”, her digital visualization artworks like scientific simulations of the Big Bang evolution and provides some wonderful  hints for those working in this field.

Quantum Cinema is a project of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Department of Media Theory.

Dynamic Earth Hurricane Katrina simulation excerpt from Spitz Inc on Vimeo.

Dynamic Earth program information

They have been working on interactive augmented reality as part of their research at the University of Illinois. That research focuses on a novel way of interacting with everyday objects by representing content as interactive surface particles. Users can build their own physical world, map virtual content onto their physical construction and play directly with the surface using a stylus.
Build your world and play in it

– Jeff Carpenter