I recently had the opportunity to visit the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at UIC with Erik Hofer. It was an especially enjoyable experience that highlighted for me and is the point of this post that it is reasonable and rewarding to explore outside your typical domain boundaries. You should go find interesting perspectives and possibilities to how you may seed creative solutions in your life and your work. Short of that, it is also good to remember that you work at one of the most impressive academic institutions in the world and we have access to so much around us that we often overlook those resources just down the hall or street from where you sit everyday. This is a privileged access we all share but so few of us take advantage.
The history of the EVL is available on their site, but notable is that this is the facility that helped create one of the first computer aided effects in cinema with the above representation of the Death Star in Star Wars Episode 3 (the first of the illustrious series of 3 episodes of which no prequel exists)
It is also home to the Cave2 which is an impressive immersive environment that should be experienced to understand. In this photo you see the driver navigating the bridge of NCC-1701 but it also has potentially extensive possibilities in medical research and education. We also cruised around Mars using NASA data sets, looked inside of protein folds and molecular models with a brief detour to Luxor Egypt.
Imagine if you will a mixture of this technology along side some of our virtual microscope or simulation needs in the learning space or perhaps being able to utilize this with our crystallographers modelling. Aside from the wizzbangery of it all, there is a potential and demonstrable value that these types of resources bring to our customers and that is worth considering.
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