We welcome collaboration with various disciplines both within and outside of the UW-Madison campus community.  Cross-disciplinary sharing creates a synergy of ideas and practices which exemplifies the mission of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. 

 

 

 

<1>:“der”// pattern for a virtual environment
Presently very little documentation exists world-wide of a CAVE™ being used as a formal gallery space for the display of artwork. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, <1>:“der”//pattern for a virtual environment, is an immersive, fifteen-minute exhibition currently consisting of six artworks, or scenarios, specifically conceived for the CAVE™.  The process of creating this art exhibition began far away from the CAVE™’s projection screens. I find wonder and pattern in nature. Over several years, I have taken thousands of photographs in the natural settings of forests, prairies, and wetlands. Culling through this library, I isolate elements of the photos, regroup them into motifs, and ‘sew’ them together through extreme image layering and masking. The resulting images are constructed patterns of substantial size and complexity that reference traditional wallpaper design but reconsider it from an entirely new point of view, creating an expansive, exploratory, imaginative experience.  This exhibition presents the outcome of a collaboration between two different disciplines, computer science and the visual arts, which together transformed this body of two dimensional artwork into a three-dimensional exhibition viewed in the CAVE™. With the assistance of Nathan Mitchell, a computer science graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I reinterpreted my work using a combination of programming strategies to endow the imaginary photographic settings with a deep sense of spaciality. As the viewer shifts her gaze and position, she senses that she is moving ‘through’ the pattern, that she is ‘inside’ of the pattern, that she has actually ‘become’ the pattern. Design elements grow larger and fade away while the immersant interacts with 3D models drawn out directly from the 2D plane. These imaginary scenes represent both interior and exterior spaces, soil and sky, natural pasts and cultivated futures.  As this project continues to evolve, we are investigating ways to make it available to a wider audience. The success of <1>:“der”//pattern for a virtual environment, indicated by the large and unexpected number of attendees, signals the promise of new, rich, and remarkable collaborations.
-Lisa Frank, MFA, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Visualization of Simulated Atmospheric Components
Weather forecasting today relies on accurate guidance generated by computer weather prediction models.  Over the years prediction models have grown exceedingly more complicated as computer power expands to accommodate greater sophistication and higher resolution.  Today's models routinely predict complicated physical processes such as the formation of clouds composed of water droplets or ice particles, the production of precipitation, and the propagation of visible and infrared radiation through the atmosphere.  The software developed to model these components must be validated against truth to determine if the components behave in a realistic fashion.  Objective statistical methods are routinely used to assess the accuracy of the output from weather prediction models; however, they typically do not resolve the temporal and spatial scales of the individual components generated by today's powerful computers.  One approach that is becoming popular is to render the 4-dimensional forecast model output in a 3-dimensional virtual reality environment such as the CAVETM.   The human eye can easily identify which model components are behaving unrealistically and make the appropriate adjustments to the software.  The interactive nature of the CAVETM allows the modeler to instantly change the viewing perspective and halt the animation when a discrepancy is detected.  Components that may react differently in specific weather regimes or under extreme weather conditions can be visualized using retrospective case studies.  One case study that has been visualized using the CAVETM was the Edmund Fitzgerald Storm of November 10, 1975.
-Robert M. Aune, Honorary Associate, University of Wisconsin-Madison