UH students turn complex data into 3-D imagery

In the basement of an aging building in Manoa, University of Hawaii students have created a futuristic chamber that is billed as the highest-resolution hybrid reality environment in the world.

Step into Destiny CyberCANOE, take a wand in each hand, and the flat-panel display encircling you comes to life, allowing you to move through an immersive virtual reality with your feet planted on the carpeted floor.

You can dive to an underwater reef and swoop in from different angles to examine tiny lavender flakes on a coral head. With the touch of a button, you can float above the Pacific Ring of Fire and instantly visualize the sites of major earthquakes over thousands of years, with pink dots revealing each one’s depth and death toll.

The structure acts like a wraparound lens to help people visualize “big data,” or vast stores of information that are otherwise hard to grasp or analyze.

“It’s all created by students, both from an engineering and software point of view,” said Chris Lee, director of the Academy for Creative Media. “Obviously, they didn’t build the flat-panel screens, but they figured out exactly how to build this facility. It is the best in the world right now of its type.”

Unlike virtual reality headsets, this is “hybrid reality,” a collaborative space that people can experience and study together, said professor Jason Leigh, who directs the UH Laboratory for Advanced Visualization &Applications and leads the Destiny project.

The panels are arrayed about 6 feet away from the viewer in a 16-sided polygon powered by eight computers, with an optical tracking system.

“You can get multiple people in there and you can look at the same data at the same time,” said Ryan Theriot, a UH senior who worked on the software. “The third dimension gives you another way to view data that might be more intuitive because we live in a 3-D environment.”

What sets Destiny apart is its resolution — up to 256 megapixels in two dimensions and 126 megapixels in 3D — Leigh said. That’s about 100 times the resolution of head-mounted displays such as the Oculus or the recent Playstation VR, he said.

And it outpaces by 3.5 times a similar data visualization system Leigh developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, known as CAVE2, which had the sharpest resolution ever when it was built in 2012. While there are similar systems at other universities, none match Destiny’s resolution, “so we are still at the top,” he said.

“Scientists have so much data in the world that they can capture, but they have to make sense of it,” said Leigh, who was recruited to UH in spring 2014 as part of the Hawaii Innovation Initiative. “The quality of the image can determine the quality of the insight.”

“I’ve been building these kinds of systems for a long, long time. Destiny is now the highest-resolution hybrid reality environment in the world, and it is the only system that uses OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology.”

Destiny cost about $250,000, with funding from National Science Foundation grants, the Academy for Creative Media and the university. By comparison, CAVE2 cost $900,000 and is now sold commercially by Mechdyne for more than $1.7 million, Leigh said.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser got an early look at the project this week before it is officially unveiled.

“We are still in the midst of confidence testing before we make it openly available to scientific users at UH,” Leigh said. “As a result, few scientists have seen it.”

Students working on the project come from different disciplines, including engineering, computer sciences and art. Andrew Guagliardo, a senior on the animation track in creative media, used a HoloLens to create a hologram visualization of the project for the team before they committed to ordering parts to make it.

“I was able to make an augmented-reality version of this,” Guagliardo said. “You can put on the HoloLens, and before we even built it, we could see it in the space. We were able to move it around, see where it would fit, where we wanted to put the entryway.”

Lately he has been developing bird flocking algorithms in Destiny, quite a change of pace for him.

“The funny thing is I actually dropped out of college,” said Guagliardo, a Brooklyn native. “I was going to school for business, but I didn’t like it. I loved art but figured you can’t make any money doing that. … I was convinced by friends and family to take another crack at school, and I’m so glad I did.”

Noel Kawano, a master’s degree candidate in electrical engineering, led the structural design effort, devouring papers Leigh had written about the CAVE2 system and another project. He had to design the system with an error margin of just one-thirty-second of an inch.

“The weird thing is I had never actually seen any of them in real life, so I had to base everything off of those papers,” Kawano said. “So this is my first time ever seeing a visualization of that. And it worked out. I felt better as an engineer because when it turned on and we saw the 3-D, it was exactly how I calculated.”

The laboratory has a variety of data sets that can be used in Destiny. Kawano has developed a visualization of “Strange Attractors From Chaos Theory,” a visually delightful representation of math equations that shifts and swirls around the viewer in galaxylike formations.

Destiny is just the latest and greatest version of CyberCANOE, which stands for Cyber-enabled Collaborative, Analytics, Navigation and Observation Environment. Others are at UH West Oahu, UH iLab, the Imiloa Astronomy Center, UH Hilo and Kamehameha Schools.

Jack Lam, a master’s degree candidate who put together the computer cluster that powers Destiny, credits Leigh for unleashing students’ creativity in new directions.

“He has the foresight to see what the students need to be prepared for the future,” Lam said. “When I was going through my classes here, I always thought about the technologies we have now and how they work, but I never thought about the future, things that are not even invented yet, and how could that influence the way we do things now.”

Leigh is just as impressed by his students. He believes Destiny will help puncture the stereotype that Hawaii is just a vacation spot.

“To change that perception around the world, we have to put this really bright beacon that says we now have the best technology in the world,” Leigh said. “And it’s even better than yours!”

Former colleagues sometimes ask him how his students at UH measure up, Leigh said.

“It’s shocking how good they are,” he responds. “It has nothing to do with the location. You’ll find brilliant students wherever you are.”