Jump to content

Advanced Visualization Lab

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by KylieTastic (talk | contribs) at 20:56, 10 September 2020 (Filled in 9 bare reference(s) with reFill 2). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) is a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The AVL specializes in creating cinematic scientific visualizations of large, three-dimensional, time-evolving data. The AVL has contributed to a number of scientific documentaries including the IMAX films "A Beautiful Planet"[1] and "Hubble 3D"[2], a number of fulldome films[3], and television documentaries.

History

The AVL was established in 2006 by Art + Design Professor Donna Cox. Cox coined the term "Renaissance Team"[4] to describe the combination of artists, technologists, and scientists that it takes to create cinematic scientific visualizations. Unlike many visualization teams who use visualization software to create their imagery, the AVL relies primarily on visual effects tools and techniques to achieve a cinematic look[5].

As of 2020, the core AVL team members are Donna Cox (director), Robert Patterson (designer), Stuart Levy (senior programmer), Kalina Borkiewicz (senior programmer), AJ Christensen (designer), and Jeff Carpenter[6]. Past team members include Gretchen Hall and Alex Betts.

Work

In 2015-2019, the AVL created a number of visualizations as part of the National Science Foundation funded grant, CADENS[7]. This grant resulted in three fulldome documentaries - "Solar Superstorms" (2015)[8][9], "Birth of Planet Earth" (2019)[10], and "Atlas of a Changing Earth" (2021)[11] - as well as a number of flat-screen documentaries and making-of documentaries for international television and streaming.

References

  1. ^ "NCSA-enabled IMAX movie A Beautiful Planet premiering at Savoy 16 May 1st : SPlog : Smile Politely". www.smilepolitely.com.
  2. ^ "How The World's Most Powerful Visualization Lab Turns Hard Data Into Scientific Cinema". Popular Science.
  3. ^ "Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications – Fulldome Industry Organization".
  4. ^ 1988. "Renaissance Teams and Scientific Visualization: A Convergence of Art and Science". In: Collaboration in Computer Graphics Education, SIGGRAPH 88 Educator's Workshop Proceedings, D. Cox, August 1–5, 1988, p. 81 - 104;
  5. ^ "Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) | SideFX". www.sidefx.com.
  6. ^ "NCSA's Donna J. Cox Honored with Rare IPS Technology Innovation Award". HPCwire.
  7. ^ jwurth@news-gazette.com, Julie Wurth. "$1.5 million grant to NCSA to put big data on big screen". The News-Gazette.
  8. ^ "Computational science and data visualization take the spotlight in new documentary". www.nsf.gov.
  9. ^ Rubin, J. (2015, March). Visualizing the Data. Planetarian, 44(1), 12-16. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.ips-planetarium.org/resource/resmgr/planetarian/201503planetarian.pdf
  10. ^ "NCSA Visualization Team Co-Produces Birth of Planet Earth". HPCwire.
  11. ^ ""Atlas of a Changing Earth": Now in production – Spitz Creative Media".