“Constructing the cosmos isn’t easy. There are a lot of moving parts to keep in mind, ranging from the astronomically large to the infinitesimally small. But in a plain campus building on the northern fringe of the University of Illinois, Robert Patterson hurtles through a galaxy he and his colleagues created, checking and re-checking his path to account for both physics and physiology. After all, he wants to create an authentic voyage through the universe, but he doesn’t want to make anyone's stomach turn.
Patterson handles film direction and camera choreography at the Advanced Visualization Lab, where he and his colleagues have been constructing super high-quality, high-resolution, data-driven 3-D visualizations since 1985. While you may not have heard of the AVL, you likely know their work; they specialize in those large- format productions that are the bread and butter of museum dome cinemas. They played an instrumental role in creating some of the stunning data visualizations for the recent IMAX feature “Hubble 3D,” and they currently have work showing at New York’s American Natural History Museum and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, among other places.
Those productions aren’t born simply of creativity but of complex computational science, and at that intersection the AVL has found a comfortable role. Tapping the supercomputing power at its disposal at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (the mythical birthplace of HAL 9000), the AVL can make sense of massive data sets that others cannot, making it among the best in the world at turning complex data into science-driven cinematic art. “
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