RENCI Update: Combining Gaming and Visualization Technologies to Support Efficient and Effective Decision-Making

        RENCI stands for the Renaissance Computing Institute.  It is a multidisciplinary collaboration between UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University, with Engagement Sites at UNC Asheville, Duke University, Eastern Carolina University, North Carolina University, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte, and the UNC Costal Studies Institute.  
        According to the mission statement, "RENCI develops and deploys advanced technologies to enable research discoveries and practical innovations."  Much of the work of RENCI focuses on large-scale information and data visualization.
        Why is this important?  It provides an effective visual-cognitive means of understanding complex data from a variety of disciplines, and also supports the collaboration of researchers across a variety of disciplines.   It has the potential to support larger-scale decision-making and problem-solving in our technology-dependent, interconnected world.  

Take a few minutes and explore what I've posted below:
       
Press release from RENCI about the interactive dome, pictured below (photo credit: RENCI-UNC Asheville):  "To understand human-induced global changes, there's no place like dome" Nancy Foltz, 10/12/11

RENCI: Gaming the Future
        The video below provides an overview of how innovative interactive visualization tools support decision-making across many disciplines.

RENCI: Unity 3D game engine to support immersive information visualization applications:

RENCI Situation Room Multi-touch Table, UNC-Charlotte:





RELATED

RENCI pioneering the visualization industry with innovative interfaces
Tracy Boyer Clark, Innovative Interactivity (II), 2/8/10
RENCI Visualization Center Update
Lynn Marentette, Interactive Multimedia Technology, 2/9/10
RENCI Tutorial: "Beautiful Code, Compelling Evidence: Functional Programming for Information Visualization and Visual Analytics" (pdf)  J.R. Heard
RENCI: Data to Decisions
Recent Publications from RENCI:

Y. Xin, I. Baldine, A. Mandal, C. Heermann, J. Chase, and A. Yumerefendi. “Embedding Virtual Topologies in Networked Clouds.”The 6th International Conference on Future Internet Technologies (CFI). Seoul, Korean, June 2011 
Y. Xin, I. Baldine, J. Chase, T. Beyene, B. Parkhurst, and A. Chakrabortty. “Virtual Smart Grid Architecture and Control Framework.” 2nd IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (IEEE SmartGridComm), Brussels, Belgium, Oct. 2011 
X. Ju, H. Zhang, W. Zeng,M. Sridharan, J. Li, A. Arora, R. Ramnath, Y. Xin. “LENS: Resource Specification for Wireless Sensor Network Experimentation Infrastructures. ” The 6th International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation and Characterization (WinTECH), Las Vegas, Nevada, Sep. 2011
RENCI's Facebook Page
Twitter: @RENCI

Multimedia Storytelling; Brian Storm & Scott Strazzante (info via Innovative Interactivity)

Brian Storm, the founder and president of MediaStorm, recently was a presenter during UNC's Photo Night, an event that celebrates various forms of photo-journalism. Tracy Boyer, author of the Innovative Interactivity blog, recently posted about her experience attending the presentation and her chance to chat with Brian Storm over lunch.


Tracy's post provides a good overview of MediaStorm's business model, which has four main components - multiple platform publication, project-specific multimedia agency, an interactive production studio, and evangelism/training.  I think that MediaStorm's business model will hold well for the future, given the rapid changes in technology, journalism, and cross-platform interactive media. Despite the economic downturn, MediaStorm had their best year, according to Tracy.


Below is an example of what you'll find on the MediaStorm website:


Common Ground  (excerpt)
Photographer: Scott Strazzante

The full Common Ground project can be viewed at http://mediastorm.org/0023.htm


"On July 2, 2002, Jean and Harlow Cagwin watched as their home — the last remnant of their 118-acre cattle farm in Lockport, Illinois — was torn down clearing the way for a new housing development. Several years later, Ed and Amanda Grabenhofer and their four children moved into the new Willow Walk subdivision, their house just yards from where the Cagwin's home once stood.

Common Ground introduces us to the lives touched by this land, as photographer Scott Strazzante takes us on a visual journey exploring the differences and similarities of these two families while simultaneously asking us to look at what is common among us all."





What I liked about the videography and photography is how the photography juxtaposed similar pictures depicting the commonalities between the older couple who once lived on the farmland that was transformed into the suburban home for young families.


RELATED
ABOUT MEDIASTORM (from the MediaStorm website)

"Originally founded in 1994 at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, MediaStorm relaunched in March of 2005 with a focus on creating cinematic narratives for distribution across a variety of platforms.
In November 2005, MediaStorm premiered its award-winning multimedia publicationhttp://mediastorm.org. Utilizing animation, audio, video and the power of still photography, we publish diverse narratives that speak to the heart of the human condition.

MediaStorm is widely recognized for the quality editorial work we've produced for our many clients. We have created award-winning multimedia projects, interactive applications, and web sites for media companies, foundations and advocacy groups. Our clientele includes Starbucks, Council on Foreign Relations, and National Geographic Magazine. MediaStorm projects have also appeared on numerous websites including MSNBC, Slate, NPR and Reuters and have been broadcast on PBS..."

"MediaStorm is a multimedia production studio based in Brooklyn, New York and collaborating virtually with creative resources around the globe. MediaStorm's principal aim is to usher a new era of multimedia storytelling, via our  publication, our advanced workshops and our industry-leading production and consulting services. The people we hire and the culture that we have created for quality and innovation at MediaStorm are the keys to our success."

MediaStorm Founder Brian Storm advises journalism community to partner and collaborate
Tracy Boyer, Innovative Interactivity,  2/17/10
Bloggers: If you link to MediaStorm, be sure to send an email to info@mediastorm.org with your URL.


Some of my previous posts about multimedia/digital storytelling:
Visual Literacy and Multimedia Literacy Quotes
The Importance of Storytelling and Multimedia Content-Updated
Digital Storytelling Platforms and Multiple Perspectives: A look at the work of Jonathan Harris - food for thought for interactive timeline design.
Two Interesting Posts:  Colin Mulvany "Will the touch tablet save professional journalism?" & Michael Arrington -"The End of Hand Crafted Content"
Umajin Creative - Digital Storytelling for Interactive Whiteboard or Touch Screen- free demo available.
Resources for the (therapeutic) use of digital and multimedia storytelling & social stories for children and teens.

RENCI at UNC-Chapel Hill: Serious Gaming and Simulation, Unity 3D Platform

VIDEO
Running the Unity 3D Game Engine in a Global Immersion 4-Projector Dome System at the RENCI@UNC Engagement Center



For more information:
Serious Gaming and Simulation at RENCI@UNC

"The application of game technology to teaching, training, and research has been a topic of interest at RENCI@UNC. More specifically, the adaptation of game engines and 3D environments to the specialized visualization environments at the engagement center is a promising area for experimentation and collaboration...We very recently obtained copies of Unity, and have been working through some of the basics. One of the first activities was to create specialized code to show Unity-built 3D environments in our Global Immersion dome system. This was successfully accomplished with a good bit of code-hacking to render the proper camera views and viewports for the four channel dome system. There are some known issues with the Windows stand-alone viewer that we were able to work around. We did some imaginative manipulation of the Unity Plug-in using a browser embedded within a WPF application that allows arbitrary screen resolutions, as well as spanning across multiple displays. Look for a post later with some technical details."
FYI
Here are some pictures from RENCI:

RENCI at Duke University: Multi-Touch Collaborative Wall and Table utilizing TouchLib; More about UNC-C's Viz lab...

RENCI is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between several universities in North Carolina, with centers located at the Europa Center, Duke University, N.C. State, UNC Chapel Hill, East Carolina University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Charlotte, and the Health Sciences Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Many of the centers focus on visualization and collaborative technologies, and have been involved in multi-touch "surface" computing.

The pictures below are from the RENCI center at Duke University:

Duke Multi-Touch Collaborative Wall

The multi-touch wall is 13 x 5 feet, and utilizes six high-definition projectors, resulting in a combined resolution of 5760-2160, and supports multiple users. According to information on the RENCI website, the design is scalable and applicable to non-flat surfaces. The wall system runs on Windows and Linux.

(Photo by Josh Coyle)

(Photo by Josh Coyle)

DI, or Direct Illumination is used for touch detection in both the wall and the table for detecting touch. A separate instance of Touchlib runs for each of the 8 cameras used to detect touch. A gesture engine interprets the information about touches on the screen as gesture events. Each camera is handled separately for image processing and blob tracking tasks.

Graphics from the RENCI Vis Group Multi-Touch Blog

Here is cool picture of the "Multi-touch Calibration Device", which uses a built-in TouchLib utility.

Additional information can be found on the RENCI Vis Group Multi-Touch Blog.

FYI

Touchlib is a multi-touch development kit that can be found on the NUI-Group website.

"Touchlib is a library for creating multi-touch interaction surfaces. It handles tracking blobs of infrared light, and sends your programs these multi-touch events, such as 'finger down', 'finger moved', and 'finger released'. It includes a configuration app and a few demos to get you started, and will interace with most types of webcams and video capture devices. It currently works only under Windows but efforts are being made to port it to other platforms."

If you are interested in creating your own multi-touch table, the NUI-Group website and forums are a great place to start.

Related:

If you follow my blog, you probably know that I've taken several graduate courses at UNC-Charlotte. Some of my professors and a classmate or two have been involved in some exciting visualization research over the past year. (If you are serious about multi-touch and other visually-based applications, it is worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with visualization and interaction research.)

News from the UNC-Charlotte Vis Center:

At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, RENCI is a collaboration between the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science, and the Charlotte Visualization Center.

11/06/2008
Robert Kosara’s group wins two awards at IEEE VisWeek Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara won Honorable Mention (the second highest award) at the IEEE InfoVis Conference for their paper, “The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors”. Also, Alex Godwin, Kosara’s student, won Best Poster for his submission, “Visual Data Mining of Unevenly-Spaced Event Sequences”.

The Vis Center is pretty fascinating, as you can see by the group of visitors at an open house.

If you are just as fascinated by this stuff as the guys in the picture, here are links to some recent papers by UNC-Charlotte faculty affiliated with the Vis Center:

The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors (Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara)

Evaluating the Relationship Between User Interaction and Financial Visual Analysis (Don Hyun Jeong, Wenwen Dou, Felsia Stukes, William Ribarsky, Heather Richter Lipford, Remco Chang)

Visual Analytics for Complex Concepts Using a Human Cognition Model (Tera Marie Green, William Ribarsky, and Brian Fisher)

Online Multimedia Library from LEARN NC and UNC Chapel Hill for K-12 and higher

Learn N.C. has a wealth of on-line resources for educators, students, and parents. I particularly like the on-line multimedia library. Below are links to resources for the following topics, obtained through the "tag cloud" on the multimedia library site.

Here are the direct links:
4-H clubs Agra American Indians American Indian towns Angkor animals archaeology architecture artAsia Bali Bangkok beaches birds boat Buddhism Cambodia carvings children Colombia colonialcostumes deities demons drawings Ecuador Emerald Buddha Temple excavations families farming fishing flowers food forests geography girls grass Green 'N' Growing Hanoi Hanuman Hinduism history houses illustrations India Indonesia Jaipur Jodhpur John White Khmer kings labor
landforms landscapes maps markets men's work Mexico monkeys monuments mountains murals musicMysore national parks Nepal North Carolina Occaneechi paintings palaces performance RamaRamayana Ravana religion rice rivers rural life salt marshes sandstone Sita snakes Southeast Asiatechnology temples Thailand theaters tourism
transportation trees turkey Ubud urban life Utah Vietnam Vietnam War Virginia water women women's work

LEARN NC is led by a number of knowledgable staff and consultants.

The website is worth exploring for a while!

Take a wlook