NCSA NEWS

Supercomputing Goes to the Academy Awards

released 02.14.97

 

Contact Information
Karen Green
Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
217.265.0460 fax

CHAMPAIGN, IL — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), announced today that the center's supercomputers and researchers played a major role in the making of the IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage." The film was nominated on February 11 for an Academy Award in the Documentary (short subject) category.

"Cosmic Voyage" is the first IMAX film to use as much as four minutes of supercomputer scientific visualization and to involve virtual reality techniques in the production process. The four-minute segment, which begins with the big bang, shows the expansion of the universe, the gravitational collapse of structure and the formation of galaxies, and the collision of two spiral galaxies.

Scientific visualization (computer graphics) experts at NCSA and University of Illinois, Grand Challenge Cosmology Consortium (GC3) scientists, numerous high-performance computers at multiple centers, including the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC), and two movie production companies worked on the project. The film is a production of the Smithsonian Institute, Motorola Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Cosmic Voyage Inc. The visualizations of the supercomputer simulations were the results of a collaborative effort made by people throughout the scientific and film communities and across the nation.

At the heart of the collaboration is Donna Cox, UIUC professor of art and design and principal investigator of NCSA's Renaissance Experimental Laboratory. Cox acted as the associate producer for scientific visualization for "Cosmic Voyage" and as art director for the four-minute simulation segment. "'Cosmic Voyage' has been a great collaboration among artists, scientists, and technologists. It tells a magnificent story about our place in the grand scale of the Universe, " said Cox.

Cox and Robert Patterson, visualization and virtual environment designer at NCSA, designed the aesthetics of the visualization using some 30 interface parameters, including color and transparency.

To create the camera moves through the simulations, Cox worked with Patterson, the choreographer of the sequence, and Marcus Thiebaux, the virtual environment research programmer at University of Illinois at Chicago's (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory. Together they created a voice-driven CAVE application called the Virtual Director, a virtual reality method for directing the computer graphics camera for real-time playback with animation recording. "The Virtual Director allowed us to easily navigate through the 3D data searching for the most interesting and revealing angles," said Patterson.

Erik Wesselak, a former NCSA programmer, wrote an interface between the simulation data and a custom particle renderer-the Star Renderer-developed by PIXAR Senior Scientist Loren Carpenter. Also involved in the production of the simulations for the film were Mike Norman, NCSA research scientist, who was a member of the Smithsonian Scientific Advisory Board; Greg Bryan, NCSA post-doctoral student, who helped PIXAR with the algorithms to represent the expansion of the universe; and Barry Sanders, NCSA, who managed over 100 gigabytes of data.

The Academy Awards will be presented March 24.

NCSA, a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is dedicated to advancing leading-edge technologies in information and high-performance computing and communications in academia and industry. The center receives major funding support from the National Science Foundation, other government agencies, NCSA's corporate sponsors, the State of Illinois, and the University of Illinois.

 
 
More headlines