by Angela Guess
Quentin Hardy recently reported on the Allosphere, “a tool for new ways of seeing enormous amounts of data – and quite possibly, ourselves. The machine is egg-shaped, three stories tall, and located on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Scientists stand on a catwalk that runs through its middle, and wearing 3D glasses look at enormous representations of human brains, molecular bonds, economic data, even the invisible manifestations of quantum physics. The visuals stretch around vision’s periphery to simulate immersion in an object, and sound from banks of speakers provide other pathways to information.”
He continues, “On a recent visit, I stood in the middle of a giant human brain, constructed from 256 MRI images. We moved over folds and through color-coded lobes, the density of blood flow around us reflected in the pitch of a background thrum – higher pitches for higher densities. I explored the bonds of 2000 zinc, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, an experimental lattice created to explore new solar cells that had taken five supercomputers six months to create. This time, the orchestra was the emission spectrum of electrons jumping to different orbits from the hydrogen. You could look at data like this through columns of numbers, of course, but the use of color, sound and time makes for a vastly quicker and more comprehensive understanding. As we pile up information of all sorts, new tools for understanding like the Allosphere will become commonplace.”
Hardy notes, “Companies like EMC, IBM and HP are meantime creating even more possibilities, through the capture and storage of all sorts of sensor, supply chain, and organizational and human behavioral data. There is an undeniable larger result here. Humans build tools, and in turn tools remake people. With the microscope we became aware of a world of protozoa, airplanes made us creatures that fly, and phones connected our voices around the world. The Web is clearly connecting us in new ways – so are the tools for understanding all the information the networked world brings us. New visualizations will, in time, help us see the world’s patterns and processes, and our relationship to them, entirely anew.”
