Reaching for the Stars

Space is big – so big, in fact, that it’s hard to comprehend the enormous distances between stars or what happened from the Big Bang to the present. Thanks to NCSA’s visualization team, we can experience these abstract concepts translated into tangible and understandable ways.

NCSA’s visualization team has been creating stunning, multi-dimensional representations of data and information for many years. Some of this work has been used in popular IMAX films, like 2010’s Hubble 3D, featuring narration by Leonardo Dicaprio or 2013’s Solar Superstorms with Benedict Cumberbatch. These and other visualizations the team has created help make abstract concepts easy to understand for non-scientists.

The Center offers 30- to 45-minute tours of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory during which participants are presented with a curated selection of videos showcasing the visualization team’s expertise. One goal of these tours is to inspire students to explore science.

Shannon Miller is a paraprofessional with the Oakland Community School District, about a 50-minute drive south of NCSA in Coles County, Illinois. She and high school math teacher Emily Myers brought students to NCSA last summer for a tour that inspired her students in a big way.

“We wanted to show how science and computers can come together to create masterpieces,” Miller said. “It was amazing to see how the videos came to be and how realistic they appeared. Students were impressed by the fact that the people involved in creating the video also worked closely with people from Hollywood. That seems to always leave a big impression on kids.”

NCSA tours are complemented with insights from team members Jeff Carpenter and Stuart Levy. Carpenter is a research visualization designer, and Levy is a senior research programmer. Both offer behind-the-scenes details on how the visualizations were built, how they were used by scientists, and where the data used in generating them came from. The two bring depth to the tours, answering many questions posed by participants.

In one clip from Birth of Planet Earth, the immersive visualization of photosynthesis we see is the culmination of decades of work by Klaus Shulten, who led the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCBG) at the University of Illinois. Levy described how this visualization represents the work of many researchers.

“Klaus Schulten, who led the TCBG for most of three decades, had the understanding of this kind of photosynthesis among the big problems that he hoped to address,” Levy said. “Researchers in the group described their construction of the chromatophore model–the structure that processes light into chemical energy – as the product of a mountain of Ph. D. dissertations over the years.”

NCSA’s tours are not just for younger audiences, though. Many groups on campus include our tours as part of their offerings to university students and staff, as team-building exercises or to learn about NCSA’s resources and capabilities.

“Everyone in my group was talking about the experience for days afterward, and they prompted others to join the tour the next time it’s scheduled.”
_{–Anthony Brienza, Food Service Administrator}

Anthony Brienza is a food service administrator and culinary training coordinator with University Housing. He brought two tour groups of university staff to NCSA in an effort to share what different units on campus do.

“Being the coordinator of our Dining Services Management Summer tours, I jumped at the chance to watch the video clips of effects that were produced at the U. of I.,” Brienza said. “I have seen many of the IMAX movies you have contributed to, and it gives me a lot of pride for the university. I wanted to share the accomplishments of our community with my team members.”

Seeing the work produced by the AVL team can have a lasting impact on tour participants.

“Everyone in my group was talking about the experience for days afterward, and they prompted others to join the tour the next time it’s scheduled,” Brienza said. “They felt strongly enough about the presentation to spread the word to other managers of the accomplishments and opportunity for others to visit and learn.”

It’s also entertaining for those leading the tours, as Levy describes.

“One thing that’s especially fun from a tour is when we show stereoscopic (3D) videos with many stars appearing to pass close to us, as in the Goldbaum evolving galaxy piece or the swirling-orange-galaxies part of the Stephen Hawking Quantum to Cosmos video. Sometimes kids especially, but adults too, will see the stars buzzing by in front of their eyes and try to reach out and touch them,” Levy said.

To request a tour for your group of five or more, visit the Request a Tour page. NCSA is proud to offer these experiences that make the impact of science more vivid for all.

Because of the impact the tour had on her students, Miller and her team hope to bring another cohort to a future tour.

“It seemed to open their eyes to even more possibilities that are available within the science field for those that want to create and not just research.”

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ABOUT NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing, expertise and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use innovative resources to address research challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been assisting many of the world’s industry giants for over 35 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.