The room is designed to help researchers work more intuitively and collaboratively in a data-rich environment. If you think of the four walls of the SCR as a whiteboard, InfoMesa allows any kind of data or visualization to be added to the whiteboard. Its tools are interactive, allowing data to be absorbed from data sources like Oracle, SQL Server, Excel spreadsheets, XML or even Cloud-based Web services.

Sam Batterman, a Microsoft specialist in business intelligence, data visualization and sensemaking for the life sciences, visited RENCI last summer to help integrate InfoMesa into the SCR. InfoMesa development is ongoing and many new features are expected to be added in the months to come.

For more on RENCI’s work with InfoMesa, visit Instance of Idea, the blog by Mike Conway, systems specialist at RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill. Or Sam Batterman’s blog.

On May 6, the room, which uses 12 projectors to create a 360-degree display for virtual, immersive and interactive experiences, hosted the student exhibit “Luminescence ,” a conglomeration of digital media art projects created by 11 students in David Tinapple’s Advanced Digital Media Studio. Luminescence was both an art exhibit and a final project for these students, and the Social Computing Room, which accommodates directed audio and high definition video on all four walls, was the perfect setting to experience their work.

“As a teaching environment, RENCI’s Social Computing Room was a powerful motivator and helped the students to see the concept of video and interaction in a new light,” said Tinapple, an art department instructor. “The collaboration across disciplines, artists working with visualization specialists, was a pleasure and rewarding. Together we pulled it off technically and the work looked great. The art exhibit was a success.”

Luminescence was the culmination of a semester’s worth of coursework in digital media production. The class was a hands-on lab, in which students learned how to work with the latest tools of interactive multimedia in the context of contemporary digital media art, such as interactive video installations, multimedia authoring, interactive media programming, and robotic camera platforms. Their multimedia projects were created with Max/MSP/Jitter, graphical programming software used in installation and performance art, computer music, theater, video DJ performance, data visualization, robotics, and more. The software’s visual programming approach is well suited for artists and musicians, fostering experimentation and the rapid construction of complex and rich interactive audiovisual systems.

Under the direction of Tinapple, the students developed their work and then collaborated with RENCI visualization experts. “We wrote our software taking into account the dimensions of the Social Computing Room and resolutions of this wrap-around display, said Tinapple.  “We also utilized the sound system and camera network. Our software could call up any of the four video cameras mounted in the room and use the video feed to track the movement of viewers, thus making it clear to the viewer that there is a relationship between the body movement and the image on screen. We also as a class built a system for simply playing back video on all four walls of the room. This involved some trial and error to find the highest resolution we could use and still maintain high frame rates, but in the end it worked very well.”

RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill opened in late 2007 in the ITS Manning Building. The state-of-the-art facility gives RENCI the chance to collaborate with UNC faculty, staff and students and to leverage their expertise for existing and new RENCI projects. For UNC faculty, this means the chance to partner with RENCI and utilize its advanced technologies, computing resources and expertise.

“Collaborating with David Tinapple and the art students was a valuable experience for both parties. The students understood quickly the technical issues of their project and saw the benefit of using our systems, which will prepare them for the immersive and large-scale projection systems that they may encounter in the future,” said Eric Knisley, a researcher in 3D visualization at RENCI. “We hope to build more partnerships between RENCI and the UNC community.”

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of talented researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

Artist Joyce Rudinsky, an associate professor of communications studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wants to force you to get close–uncomfortably close–to the human side of the death penalty issue. Her interactive media installation Spectacular Justice, created in collaboration with the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), uses video, audio and electronic tracking to personalize an issue from which most of us would prefer to distance ourselves.

The installation premiers Friday, March 28, in the Social Computing Room of RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill in the ITS Manning Building, 211 Manning Drive. The opening reception will run from 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. on the 28th. The installation will remain open to the public from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. every Friday and Saturday through April 25.

Spectacular Justice does not take a stand on whether the death penalty is right or wrong either politically or morally. Instead, it tries to sensitize us to the people who are affected every time a prisoner is executed, from the prisoners themselves to the family members of victims to the witnesses who attend executions. Modern media, says Rudinsky, has desensitized us to the effects of crime and to all that happens after the crime is committed. Working with visualization and software experts at RENCI, Rudinsky hopes to use those same 21st century media tools to remind us that every death penalty case is a story about real people.

“This is a coming together of artists and visualization specialists who are artists in their own way,” said Rudinsky, a RENCI Faculty Fellow who made the installation her Faculty Fellows project. “We are not addressing the political issues associated with the death penalty, such as class and race. We’re not championing a pro or con position. Instead, we are trying to create a unique, very human experience of the issues that elicits a visceral response.”

Spectacular Justice will use seven channels of audio played through special focusing speakers and a robotic arm to target the installation’s sound track to individual viewers as they enter and move around the room. Visitors to the room will put on electronic tags, which will track their movements. The robotic arm will track one individual and aim customized sounds in his or her direction. Fourteen projectors will show a profusion of images and the images a visitor sees will depend on where he or she moves around the room. Clear panels called holopanels will hang from guide wires and will turn opaque with reflected imagery that is synchronized to the viewer’s experience, making it seem as if some images are hanging in space. The resulting visual and audio experience will be unique for each visitor and for each visit.

“This project is truly a collaboration between artists and technical people from conception to finish,” said Ray Idaszak, director of visualization and collaborative technologies at RENCI. “We’ve given Joyce a new canvas and a new paint brush to work with in creating her art.”

Spectacular Justice is part of the Carolina Performing Arts’ Criminal/Justice: The Death Penalty Examined project, a season-long campus- and community-wide exploration of death penalty issues, and is supported in part by a Creative Campus Innovations grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the Doris Duke Foundation. David Borland, a RENCI visualization researcher, was the chief programmer on the  project. Collaborators included Mark Robinson, director of the multimedia lab in the communications studies department. Other RENCI collaborators were Idaszak, Research Device Engineer Dan Bedard, Research Software Developer Leesa Brieger, Research Engineer Justin Burlson, Systems Specialist Mike Conway, Visualization Engineer Jason Coposky, Industrial Designer Warren Ginn, Facility Manager Mike Harris, Research Engineer Jim Mahaney, RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill Director Ruth Marinshaw and Manager of Project Engineering Erik Scott.

For more information, see http://www.rudinsky.com/justice.html.

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.