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TLtC News
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Visualize This: From Architecture to Anatomy, Virtual Simulations Deepen Our Understanding of the Real World
By Dan Gordon,
TLtC Contributor
May 2002
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In UCLA's Visualization Portal, a 40-seat virtual reality theater with a 24-foot-wide, 9-foot-high, 166-degree
curved screen that engulfs the viewer's vision, Architecture and Urban Design Professor Diane Favro leads students
on a tour of the Roman Forum - virtually speaking.
Whereas previous students were forced to rely on floor plans, photographs, and other two-dimensional
representations to learn about long-ago-destroyed buildings of the ancient world, these students are
getting their own walk-through in real time, complete with ambient sound. As the students peruse the
heart of a once-great empire, Favro engages them in discussion about how the Forum was built, how it
evolved over time, and what happened inside.
"The kinds of questions they're asking now are different from when we were relying on two dimensions,"
Favro says. "These students have a deeper understanding. It seems more real to them."
From ancient architectural structures and their urban surroundings to modern medicine and numerous
subjects in between, scholars are finding that virtual simulations can provide vivid discovery-based
learning experiences, helping students - and in some cases the scholars themselves - gain insights
into the subject matter that would otherwise be impossible.
In 1996, a team consisting of experts from the classics, architecture, archaeology, and computer
science began the ambitious task of recreating Ancient Rome - byte by byte. The "Rome Reborn" project
launched UCLA's Cultural Virtual Reality (CVR) Lab ( www.cvrlab.org ), which combines three-dimensional
computer graphics programs with meticulous research, including input from international teams of top
scholars, to create interactive models of antiquities around the world.
The CVR Lab, directed by classics professor Bernard Frischer, combines technology used in video
games with U.S. military flight-simulation software to create historical embodiments from all
over the world. PC technology is employed to produce three-dimensional content that can be distributed
on a variety of platforms.
Besides being highly visual, the three-dimensional software can account for variables related to
building materials and the laws of physics, which enables users to pay much closer attention to
how the buildings are constructed than they would from two-dimensional renderings.
While Rome Reborn remains a work in progress, many individual structures have been completed.
Students can pan, walk, or fly through the Colosseum. At Rome's Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore,
visitors can soar between the wooden beams of the cathedral's roof, down below the main floors into
the ruins of the church on which Santa Maria was built, and back up to the building's ceiling,
obtaining close-up glimpses of the mosaics. Other projects take users to Beaumaris Castle in Wales,
the Armenian Church of the Redeemer in the 11th-century capital city of Ani, and the Second Temple
of Jerusalem, the famous Jewish sanctuary rebuilt by Herod the Great and destroyed by the Romans in
70 A.D. Many of the projects are also set up to show viewers how the buildings aged over centuries.
And you don't have to sit in the Visualization Portal to experience these models because the lab
has made many of them viewable on PC platforms. "We want this to be deliverable over the average
computer," says Favro, the lab's associate director for research and educational applications.
Accessibility is one of the inherent strengths of virtual simulations, contends Dean Abernathy,
a licensed architect and associate director who manages the projects for the CVR Lab. To illustrate,
he compares the Plastico - a huge model of Augustan Rome that resides in the Museum of Roman Civilization,
located in a Roman suburb - with the UCLA CVR Lab model of the Roman Forum.
"The Plastico is stuck in a building, you have to travel to Rome to see it, and even then, you're
restricted to viewing from a catwalk," Abernathy says. "While impressive, utility is limited. You can't
touch it, you can't experience what it is like to walk the streets, at scale, and you certainly can't
change it as new information on the buildings comes to light. In contrast, digital models can be
transported, by CD, Internet, or satellite; experienced, in a virtual reality theater or on a home PC;
and even changed to reflect current scholarship."
Aiding Discovery in the Health Sciences
Virtual simulations are being used for very different purposes at the UC San Diego School of Medicine,
where a virtual reality program was created to enrich the learning experience for students in human
anatomy courses. "Anatomic VisualizeR" was developed by the Office of Educational Computing and introduced
into the UCSD Human Anatomy course in 1998, in conjunction with a single lecture. Since then, four new lesson
programs have been completed and four more are in the queue.
Teaching anatomy on an actual cadaver is a powerful learning experience, but at best the typical medical
student gets the opportunity only once, and many medical schools have discontinued the use of whole
cadavers in education, explains Helene Hoffman, assistant dean for curriculum and educational computing
at the school. A virtual reality tool, on the other hand, offers the promise of a system that could be
used at any time and anywhere in the curriculum - in lectures or on the students' own time. Moreover,
such a program could be set up to show anatomic variations. "It's engaging, it's immersive...it's much
better than flipping the pages of a book," Hoffman asserts.
Anatomic VisualizeR combines virtual reality with multimedia resources, providing tools to modify
opacity, view interior structures, and change their size or scale. The program's users can dissect
anatomic structures and reconstruct them from component parts. In addition, Anatomic VisualizeR
enables faculty and students to investigate structures and regions in ways not possible in the real world.
"Actual dissections aren't always done in the way that is most logical for learning purposes," Hoffman says.
"When working with cadavers, students are typically instructed to go from the outside to the inside in a way
that does the least amount of damage and shows the most structures. And once you've cut through something,
you can't go back and look at it again from a different perspective. But with a virtual environment you can -
you can take it apart, put it back together...even make structures transparent or brightly colored so that
you can see relationships."
Virtual reality lends itself well to teaching human anatomy, Hoffman says, because, although the technology
is expanding to include other senses, it is still most successful at creating three-dimensional worlds that
are highly visual. "Human anatomy is a very complex three-dimensional visual array of structures and
relationships between structures," Hoffman explains. "It's hard to understand simply from word descriptions."
Hoffman's office is helping to bring virtual reality into other courses in which seeing is also critical,
including physiology, surgery, and otolaryngology.
"Students love it in the lecture hall, but when they use it themselves, it goes up another notch in their
eyes," says Hoffman. "When they can put their hands on this 3-D model, rotate it, and look on the other side
of it, it's such an empowering learning environment." Hoffman's group is currently working on converting the
program to PC format.
At UC Davis, the Computer Assisted Learning Facility (CALF) was established at the School of Veterinary
Medicine as a resource to assist faculty and staff in the development of state-of-the-art interactive
educational computer programs. Since 1990, CALF ( www.calf.vetmed.ucdavis.edu ) has developed more than
200 programs for use in the veterinary curriculum, including "Virtual Heart," which utilizes high-resolution
QuickTime virtual reality technology to teach about the anatomy and physiology of the mammalian heart
through three-dimensional manipulation.
"Students can spin it around and look at the heart as a whole or from dissected views, and can zoom in for
additional detail," says Rick Hayes, who manages the lab. The program can be used alone or in conjunction
with an actual dissection, since detailed anatomical and physiological references are provided when clicking
on any major structure.
"You can hold the heart in your hands and have the computer tell you what remains," Hayes says. The program
includes sections on pathologies, diagnostic methods such as EKG and ultrasound, and microscopic views of the
heart muscle. Another feature enables users to listen to the sounds of common pathologies. CALF is currently
working on version 2.0 of the program.
Engaging Researchers and Students Alike
The ability to manipulate images holds great value not only for students, but also for university scientists.
At UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the new Visualization Center ( siovizcenter.ucsd.edu ),
housed at the Cecil and Ida Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, combines powerful computers
with a large 3.2 mega-pixel display screen to provide an immersive environment for three-dimensional viewing
and analysis of natural or man-made disasters. The center is part of a consortium with four companies and
San Diego State University.
Visualization can help make sense of otherwise overwhelming data sets, explains Graham Kent, the center's
director. For example, wind velocity, temperature, undersea topography, and ocean currents can be integrated
to provide three-dimensional images that can offer new insight into phenomena such as El Nino; wind, fuel
load, and topography combined with real-time wireless sensor data could predict where a fire will go; and
seismic data can interact with instruments in the field to predict the extent and location of damage
immediately after an earthquake. "You want to take all the physical parameters and put them into a virtual
world so you can start understanding the interdependencies," explains Kent.
Moreover, the size of the screen enables as many as 50 people to be in a room at once, facilitating
multidisciplinary collaborations. But what distinguishes Scripps' visualization center is its ability to
take the next step - to link with similar centers, facilitating scientific collaboration. Currently, the
link is to a similar center at San Diego State, over a 44-mile optic data line operating at the ultra-fast
speed of 2.5 gigabits per second. Potentially, Kent expects his center to be able to hook up with others
across the state and even overseas, enabling experts in academia, government, and industry to share data
collected by a wireless network of field sensors and collaborate in real time in the aftermath of disasters.
"When we all had PCs 10 years ago, they were useful as word processors, but once they became networked their
value was greatly enhanced," Kent says. "Similarly, your visualization center becomes much more useful when
you can connect with similar centers in a kind of virtual-reality Internet."
The visualization center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is also used both formally and informally
to teach students, and, according to Kent, is a valuable tool for attracting young people to the sciences.
"For kids today, it's a much harder sell to get them to be interested in science if we continue to teach like
we used to," Kent says. "They're used to playing with fancy graphics, and they expect no less from the
educational technology."
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###
Video Links
Play Video:
See instructor use Visualization Portal in class
File size: 1.96 mb
Length: 30 secs.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (Bernard Frischer, Director, and Diane Favro, Associate Director)
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Play Video
See fly-through of the Early Christian Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore
File size: 4.5 mb
Length: 30 secs.
Required plug-in: RealPlayer or Windows Media Player
Source: UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (Bernard Frischer, Director, and Diane Favro, Associate Director) |
Play Video
Dr. Kirk Knowlton's Heart Overview lecture presented in the Organ Physiology course, Winter 2002
File size: 4.5 mb
Length: 2.03 mins.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: Helene Hoffman, UCSD
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Play Video:
Dr. Lisa Orloff's Larynx Overview lecture presented in the Human Anatomy course, Fall 2001
File size: 1.7 mb
Length: 46 secs.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: Helene Hoffman, UCSD
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Play Video
Brief overview of Scripps Visualization Center
File size: 1.1 mb
Length: 53 secs.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: Fox News Channel 6
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Play Video:
Detailed look, including Lake Tahoe simulation
File size: 2.4 mb
Length: 3 mins.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: Fox News Channel 6
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Play Video:
Business-oriented perspective
Streaming video
Length: 5 mins.
Required plug-in: RealPlayer
Source: Business Now syndicated news program
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Projects @ a Glance
| CAMPUS: |
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UCLA |
| COURSE/PROJECT: |
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Visualization
Portal and Cultural VR Lab |
| INSTRUCTORS/PRINCIPAL
INVESTIGATORS: |
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Diane Favro,
Bernard Frischer |
| DESCRIPTION: |
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The UCLA
Cultural VR Lab was founded
in 1997 by Bernard Frischer
in collaboration with Diane
Favro of the UCLA Department
of Architecture. The mission
of the Lab is two-fold: (1)
to create authenticated 3D
computer models of culturally
significant sites around the
world; (2) to research ways
of utilizing computer models
in teaching, research, and
commerce. |
| FUNDING: |
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The Lab
receives no funding from UCLA.
It survives on gifts, grants,
and contracts. They are actively
seeking a name donor as well
as sponsors of various long-term
modeling projects (e.g., Rome
Reborn, Jerusalem Reborn,
etc.). |
| COURSE/PROJECT
WEBSITE: |
| |
Cultural
VR Lab: www.cvrlab.org
Visualization Portal: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/portal/
|
| VIDEOS: |
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>
See instructor use Visualization
Portal in class
File size: 1.96 mb
Length: 30 secs.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (Bernard Frischer, Director, and Diane Favro, Associate Director)
>
See fly-through of the Early
Christian Basilica of Santa
Maria Maggiore
File size: 4.5 Mb
Length: 30 secs.
Required plug-in: RealPlayer
or
Windows
Media Player
Source: UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (Bernard Frischer, Director, and Diane Favro, Associate Director)
|
| CAMPUS: |
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UC
San Diego |
| COURSE/PROJECT: |
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Anatomic
VisualizeR |
| INSTRUCTORS/PRINCIPAL
INVESTIGATORS: |
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Helene
Hoffman |
| DESCRIPTION: |
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Hoffman and her team are
developing "Anatomic
VisualizeR," a virtual
reality-based learning environment
which will enable medical
students to actively learn
human anatomy and apply
this knowledge to clinical
problem solving. Working
with UCSD faculty, highly
interactive, case-based
learning exercises are being
developed using a combination
of realistic 3D anatomic
models and supporting 2D
media (e.g., diagnostic
radiology, surgical videos,
microscopic imagery, etc.).
|
| FUNDING: |
| |
This
work was supported by a grant
from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DAMD
17-94-J-4487/P5002) and the
Office of Naval Research (N00014-97-1-0356). |
| COURSE/PROJECT
WEBSITE: |
| |
http://medschool.ucsd.edu/edcomp/AT/Biblio/Figures/AT9.html |
| VIDEOS: |
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>
Dr. Kirk Knowlton's Heart
Overview lecture presented
in the Organ Physiology
course, Winter 2002
File
size: 4.5 mb
Length: 2.03 mins.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: Helene Hoffman,
UCSD
>
Dr. Lisa Orloff's Larynx
Overview lecture presented
in the Human Anatomy course,
Fall 2001.
File
size: 1.7 mb
Length: 46 secs.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source: Helene Hoffman,
UCSD
|
| CAMPUS: |
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UC Davis |
| COURSE/PROJECT: |
| |
Computer
Assisted Learning Facility
(CALF), School of Veterinary
Medicine |
| INSTRUCTORS/PRINCIPAL
INVESTIGATORS: |
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Rick Hayes |
| DESCRIPTION: |
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CALF was created in 1990
as a school-wide resource
to aid faculty and staff
in developing state-of-the-art
interactive educational
programs for teaching veterinary
medicine. CALF staff are
available to consult on
program structure, scripting
interactive features, interface
design and illustration.
Their software programs
have won national awards
and are used around the
world.
|
| COURSE/PROJECT
WEBSITE: |
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http://www.calf.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/ |
| CAMPUS: |
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UC San Diego |
| COURSE/PROJECT: |
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Visualization
Center, Scripps Institution
of Oceanography |
| INSTRUCTORS/PRINCIPAL
INVESTIGATORS: |
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Graham
Kent |
| DESCRIPTION: |
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The Visualization
Center at the Cecil and Ida
Green Institute of Geophysics
and Planetary Physics, Scripps
Institution of Oceanography,
is a state-of-the-art visualization
tool for presenting, and manipulating
very large datasets. The center
employs a wide range of hardware
and software to give the user
a totally immersive working
environment in which to display,
analyze, and discuss large
datasets.
Although there are approximately
500 similar centers across
the globe, this visualization
center is unique in that
it links the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography with San
Diego State University via
optical cable, providing
a data flow of 2.4GB per
second, allowing for realtime
transmission and reception
of data. Furthermore, in
academia the few installed
units are generally in campus
computer centers or computer
science departments while
the center at Scripps is
located within a department
specifically concerned with
the application of the technology
to scientific problems.
|
| FUNDING: |
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The principal sponsors
of the Visualization Center
are:
California Institute of
Telecommunications and Information
Technology: Cal-[ IT ]2
(http://www.calit2.net),
Cecil and Ida Green Institute
of Geophysics and Planetary
Physics (http://igpp.ucsd.edu),
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(http://www.sio.ucsd.edu),
and the San Diego Supercomputer
Center (http://www.sdsc.edu).
A full list of sponsors
can be found online: http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu/sponsors.html
|
| COURSE/PROJECT
WEBSITE: |
| |
http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu
Press release announcing
center: http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/viz_center.html
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| VIDEOS: |
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>
Brief overview
File
size: 1.1 Mb
Length: 53 secs.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source:
Fox News Channel 6
>
Detailed look, including
Lake Tahoe simulation
File
size: 2.4 Mb
Length: 3 mins.
Required plug-in: QuickTime
Source:
Fox News Channel 6
>
Business-oriented perspective
Streaming
video
Length: 5 mins.
Required plug-in: RealPlayer
Source:
BusinessNow syndicated news
program
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Article URL: http://www.uctltc.org/news/2002/05/feature.php
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