UCLA's Visualization Portal
Transcends Time and Space
Portal
Sampler (video)
A 40-seat theater with up-to-date virtual reality
technologies located on the 5th floor of the Math Science Building,
the facility is literally a portal into other times, places,
and experiences. The Portal is used for both instruction and
research, and has particular foci on Historical Architectural
Monuments, Scientific Visualizations and Digital Technologies
for the Performance Arts. Research being worked on in the Portal spans the arts, sciences,
humanities, urban planning projects, and medicine.
Seventy classes were held in the Portal last year, which translated
to 1,226 UCLA students experiencing art, history and science
through virtual reality models and scientific visualizations.
In addition, seven
students have used the Portal and Modeling Lab to work on
or defend their dissertations.
ATS provides the technology infrastructure and programming support for these projects. The Experiential Technologies Center (ETC) oversees projects involving modeling and historic reconstructions. The Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) oversees projects in scientific visualization and computational simulation. Through partnerships with centers and institutes, Academic Technology Services is able to assure that projects are successful and maintain a high degree of scholarly integrity.
Visitors to the Portal
More than 4,000 people visit the Visualization
Portal each year. That includes UCLA researchers who go there
to work in their disciplines or to present their work to other
scholars, university professors who bring their students to get
a first-hand look at art and science that they’d otherwise
only read about in books, applications developers who work to
advance the capabilities of the virtual reality applications
and the digital media being used in the Portal, potential grantors,
potential UCLA faculty and graduate students, and about 600 students
from area K-12 schools.
Visit the Portal
See the Calendar of Events
Historical Architectural Monuments
A real-time tour of the Coliseum has helped more than one visitor
imagine the rage and panic of animal and man as they were pushed
out into the fighting ground Ancient Rome. And visitors can
almost catch the smell of musk and candle wax as they conjure
up the
worshippers of Santa Maria Maggiore lighting their candles
and praying to the Madonna. It’s easy for visitors to feel
they’re wandering the streets of Port Royal as Captain
Morgan goes looking for rum, and almost everyone is touched
by the sweet high voices coming from St. James Cathedral in
Santiago
de Compostela.
The historical architectural models shown in the Portal are
an experiment in using virtual reality to recreate a place and
time that no longer exist. Used both for research and instruction,
there are currently 42 models under development to improve the
understanding of the original historical site and to develop
new applications that will ultimately heighten the research and
instruction experiences.
Scientific Visualization
The Visualization Portal is not just about architectural models
that allow visitors to wander back in time a thousand years or
more. The Visualization Program at Academic Technology Services
was designed to help researchers comprehend vast amounts of data – usually
the results of simulations. ATS consultants work with faculty
researchers to create visualizations.
Virtual reality models have been created from simulations of the creation of
the universe, weather models, cloud data, laser beams acting on plasmas, and
antibodies. These models can be explored both spatially and temporally in the
Portal. Numerous movies have also been created from scientific data that take
advantage of the large display space the Portal screen provides.
Digital Technologies for the Performance Arts
The Portal is also a venue where artists and performers can
create innovative projects that rely on digital technologies.
In the past two years, the Portal has been used for the development
and presentation of projects that allow performers to simultaneously
work with colleagues around the world and a project that created “bucky
balls” – the nickname given to hollow, sphere-shaped
carbon molecules reminiscent of architect R. Buckminster Fuller’s
geodesic dome.
Accessibility
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