A Symphony of Data
by David Pescovitz
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The interface to EEWWW! is a hand-held "fork" sensor that the user scans over a model of a human.
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What is the best
way to navigate the massive datasets — from seismological
statistics to anatomical models — now available online? Try
playing them like musical instruments.
That was the idea behind Design Realization, a new course in the
Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD), a nascent cross-disciplinary
research center and graduate program in the College of Engineering.
Affiliated with the Center for Information Technology Research in
the Interest of Society (CITRIS), BiD is dedicated to training a
new breed of human-centered designers well versed in technology
and the social implications of innovation.
To that end, instructors Maribeth Back and Steve Harrison took thirteen
students through the entire design process — from conception
to sketches to the building of working prototypes — with a
profound goal: to create a physical instrument to control digital
data "in much the same way that a violinist pulls incredible sound
from an instrument."
"This is design as research," Back says.
Divided into four groups, the students — mostly from the Departments
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Mechanical Engineering
— designed systems that ranged from surprisingly intuitive
to intensely surreal.
Moving
the EEWWW! handheld sensor over a model human (see above
photo) displays a corresponding one—mm horizontal slice
of an adult male body.
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For example, Eeeww! consists of a handheld u-shaped utensil that
the user drags up and down a plastic anatomical model of a human.
As the user moves up and down the body, cross-sectional images of
corresponding one—mm-slices of the body appear on the screen.
The data came from the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human
Project, a dataset consisting of Magnetic Resonance and Computed
Tomography scans.
"We wanted
to make learning about the human body more fun for very young students
in the seventh or eighth grade," says computer science graduate
student Wai-Ling Ho-Ching. "To do this, we had to think about how
we can use physical devices to create something that exists both
on the screen and in the human world."
The creators of
QuakeView also designed a novel interface to navigate digital data
about the real world. Inspired by a disk jockey's turntable and
mixer, the group built a console that controls the view of topographical
data representing the earthquake history of the San Andreas Fault.
For example, "scratching" the jog dial — fabricated from a
discarded compact disk — back and forth enables the user to
compress or expand the period in history appearing on the screen.
A screenshot from Shazam, a tool enabling artists to choreograph computer graphic effects to music.
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"I had never worked
with such a diverse team," says QuakeView co-inventor Ka-Ping "Ping"
Yee, a computer science graduate student. "But we were able to utilize
all of our different strengths — electronics, software, graphic
design, industrial design — to make this work."
Two of the student
groups applied their developing design talent to more artistically
aimed endeavors. LOUD, an immersive 3-D audio environment, gives
visitors the opportunity to explore similarities in music from around
the world. Meanwhile, Shazam is "an artist's workbench for choreographing
visual effects" using a handheld position sensor, similar to a symphony
conductor's wand, and a table-mounted control board. According to
co-inventor Michael Toomim, also a computer science graduate student,
Shazam was built as a tool for video artists who show off their
chops at dance clubs or "Demo Parties," underground gatherings of
multimedia programmers.
"There are lots
of tools for programming visual effects and manipulating them with
a mouse, but there was no real way to compose a work of dynamic
visual effects as you would make, say, a painting," Toomim says.
"We wanted to be able to use our hands and really get into playing
with visual effects in real time."
The power of real-time interaction with complex data is the crux
of what Back and Harrison hoped to convey with their course.
"There are a huge number of datasets that can be extended into the
realm of playability, exploration, and expression, unlike the call-and-response
mode of Web sites," Back says. "When you bring things closer to
real time, you get a much more visceral sense of the patterns that
exist in the data."
Design Realization
Berkeley Institute of Design
CITRIS
Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking
research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow.
Editor, Director of Public Affairs: Teresa Moore
Writer, Researcher: David Pescovitz
Designer: Robyn Altman
Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Public Affairs Office: lab-notes@coe.berkeley.edu.
© 2003 UC Regents.
Updated 2/28/03.
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