Integrative Graduate
Education and
Research Traineeship

Highlight

Touching DaVinci (IGERT Associate Kevin Ponto)

Hands-on Exploration of Cultural Heritage Data

Projects:

IGERT: Training, Research and Education in Engineering...

Institution:

University of California at San Diego

Primary Strategic Goal:

Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Secondary Strategic Goal:

Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.

Achievement/Results

http://www.youtube.com/user/Calit2ube#p/u/235/E...

Address Goals

Imagine a space that will allow users to literally walk into the “Science Arena” and to join others in the adventure of hands-on discovery. A science arena that provides a networked, massively, multi-user, edutainment environment, which will allow participants to collaboratively access, discuss, analyze and disseminate content, in a format that makes users believe that they are engaging in a new form of digitally enabled exploration and social networking, while indeed learning about hardcore science. Given today’s technologically savvy and well-equipped target audience, it is possible to blend science and informal science education with a touch of science fiction, supporting new modes of active learning.

The associated research explores new visual analytics techniques for the intuitive, hands-on analysis of massive, multi-dimensional and multi-variate data, introducing a set of metaphors such as wiping, scratching, sandblasting, squeezing, and drilling, which allow for rapid analysis of global and local characteristics in the data set, accounting for factors such as gesture size, pressure and speed. For example, by aligning multi-spectral image layers in a stack, users can apply the different multi-touch metaphors to investigate features across different wavelengths. With this technique, flexibly definable data regions can be interrogated concurrently without affecting surrounding data, supporting new modes of data analysis suitable for the domain specialist just as much as the layman explorer.