ATLAS in silico is a physically interactive virtual reality installation. It fuses art and emerging technologies with pioneering science. The installation offers an ethereal and dreamlike immersive 3D environment, wherein you can explore life-size renderings of the Global Ocean Survey -- a recent pioneering voyage of discovery circumnavigating the Earth's oceans, the results of which give us a new picture of life on Earth.
The room-size installation is playful and yet meaningful for people of all ages: Participants may simply observe, or individuals can step forward and use their own movements to animate and maneuver the colorful 3D images and audio. The captivating onscreen images and multichannel audio are created by a unique process that combines genetic information from microorganisms collected by the Global Ocean Survey with environmental and social data from the geographical locations in which the organisms were found, to create a human context for this major scientific breakthrough.
In parallel to this oceanic journey that was inspired by 19th Century global circumnavigations of the H.M.S Challenger and H.M.S. Beagle, the aesthetics of this artwork are grounded in history and in our future. They embody the visual culture and relationship that existed between art and science in the 19th Century, and the renewal of this relationship in the 21st Century via emerging digital technologies. ATLAS in silico creates a visceral, sensate experience of the abstraction of nature in to vast databases like the GOS.
Participants experience a dream-like, highly abstract, and data-driven virtual world that combines the aesthetics of fine-lined copper engraving, lithography and grid-like layouts of 19th Century scientific representation with 21st Century digital aesthetics including 3D wireframes, particle systems, interactive 3D graphics and multi-channel spatialized audio. By interacting with the luminous and colorful 3D graphics and a responsive data-driven sonic microworld, participants explore relationships within data that spans from the molecular to the global. This experience takes place within an immersive virtual environment constructed from contextual metadata. It animates the virtual world as a driving force, much like natural ocean currents, while revealing internal structure within the data and metadata.
Through this ongoing art-science collaboration we explore the possibilities for achieving works with multiple entry points that can exist concurrently as aesthetic experiences, artistic practice, and as the basis for scientific tools. The title refers to in silico (computational as opposed to in vivo or in vitro) biology and the abilities that emerging technologies offer us in atlasing the features of our world in ever-increasing detail.
| Graphics | |
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This early prototype of the virtual world in which users are immersed in an oceanic stream of data that has the characteristics of fluid shows a user reaching in to the three-dimensional space and selecting a group of data elements.Within this virtual world, each data element is represnted by a luminous particle. The movement, or trajectory, of each particle in this space creates a spatial signature that reveals the relationship of that individual element to the whole. The environment is constructed from the metadata characteristics recorded during the Global Ocean Survey (GOS). Each particle is one data record describing a unique protein sequence from the GOS data. The trajectory of each particle represents a unique spatial signature allowing for large patterns within the data to be revealed, and for users to experience and aesthetic encounter with massive data sets. |
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The white line in this image shows a part of a spatial signature of one data element in the context of fifty-thousand other data elements. Patterns have emerged that show groups of related data elements. |
| Samples of the unique shape grammar that transforms a mixture of genomic and social, environmental, and sample collection metadata into unique three-dimensional shapes that users interact wtih in the virtual environment. Sequences from the Global Ocean Survey data are represented in the immersive environment as luminous particles that when brought in to close proximity by participants become luminous three-dimensional objects that reveal their story in multiple layers of information that intertwine biology, with its social, environmental and metadata contexts. This visual form is paralleled by unique sonic signatures and text to speech synthesis. | |
| Audio | |
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The unique sonic microworld
of ATLAS in silico is both experiencially and data -driven.
It is designed and implemented in Pure Data. A multi-channel
spatialized interactive audio environment constructed from customized
10.1 audio hardware enables full coverage of the interactive
area with even frequency response and dynamic variability. Listen to sample of the audio environement in the online video. Audio for ATLAS in silico premiered a newly-developed hybrid strategy for sound rendering in immersive virtual reality, combining amplitude, delay and physical modeling-based, real-time spatialization approaches for enhanced expressivity and spatial depth in the virtual sound environment. |
| Computer Vision | |
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A custom computer vision interface utilizing optical marker-less motion tracking enables intuitive user interaction withthe Varrier tiled display using standard communication protocols. The system utilizes stereo-vision to track users' head and hand positions and vectors within a 3D space. |
| Data | |
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The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Survey expedition circumnavigated the earth during 2003 to 2006. During its journey it sampled the microbial biodiversity of the oceans. The resulting data will have implications not only for an understanding of the biodiversity of our planet, but for biological energy production, bioremediation, and for possible solutions for the management of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.Visit the CAMERA website for Information about the expedition and the resulting data. (Image courtesy of CAMERA/Global Ocean Survey) |
| Varrier Display | |
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The Varrier is a 100-millionn pixel semi-circular tiled display. Its unique technology enables viewers to experiennce immersive virutal reality in 3D stereo without the use of special glasses. It is a haed-tracked system that produces autostereoscopic imagery through a combination of a physical parallax barrier and a virtual barrier, so that the stereoscopic images are directed correctly into the viewer's eyes. It was featured at IEEE VR 2007 and in numerous publications. |
