Allosphere @ Nanosystems Institute, UCSB

[Cerpin Taxt]

http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/allosphere/

This thing is like a spherical 3D planetarium, except they were projecting a rendering of a human brain with these animated autonomous indicators flying about revealing things about blood flow and neural activity in the brain. The guy who was operating it was using a gyroscopic mouse-like instrument to turn the view on its axes and translate the center of view throughout the enormous 3D model.

I only got to see a few of the projectors operational, but when its complete it will feature 14 stereoscopic projectors. The surround sound audio was working though, and the animated indicators generated various beeps and pings and whistles as they flew about.

I really wish they had some kind of sample of the images on the website so you could get an idea what it looked like. Words don't really describe it.

 

[jagec]

Hmm, can you use it to locate mutants?

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Not really sure. I didn't get a chance to talk to the dude about its research usefulness. We just talked mostly about the hardware used to build it.