Of CAVEs and Curiosity: Imaging and Imagination in Collaborative Research

On Monday, 03/04/2013, Dawn Sumner, one of KeckCAVES‘ core members, gave a talk in UC Berkeley‘s Art, Technology, and Culture lecture series, together with Meredith Tromble of the San Francisco Art Institute. The talk’s title was “Of CAVEs and Curiosity: Imaging and Imagination in Collaborative Research,” and it can be viewed online (1:12:55 total length, 50 minutes talk and 25 minutes lively discussion).

While the talk is primarily about the “Dream Vortex,” an evolving virtual reality art project led by Dawn and Meredith involving KeckCAVES hardware (CAVE and low-cost VR systems) and software, Dawn also touches on several of her past and present scientific (and art!) projects with KeckCAVES, including her work on ancient microbialites, exploration of live stromatolites in ice-covered lakes in Antarctica, our previous collaboration with performing artists, and — most recently — her leadership role with NASA‘s Curiosity Mars rover mission.

The most interesting aspect of this talk, for me, was that the art project and all the software development for it, are done by the “other” part of the KeckCAVES project, the more mathematically/complex systems-aligned cluster around Jim Crutchfield of UC DavisComplexity Sciences Center and his post-docs and graduate students. In practice, this means that I saw some of the software for the first time, and also heard about some problems the developers ran into that I was completely unaware of. This is interesting because it means that the Vrui VR toolkit, on which all this software is based, is maturing from a private pet project to something that’s actually being used by parties who are not directly collaborating with me.

3 thoughts on “Of CAVEs and Curiosity: Imaging and Imagination in Collaborative Research

    • I was being facetious, but still appreciate the sentiment. 🙂

      But it was a strange feeling hearing someone during a talk mention a problem they ran into, without me having heard about it before. I imagine it’s like suddenly realizing your child is all grown up (I still have some years left before that’ll happen to me).

  1. Pingback: Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner on Collaborative Art-Science Research in CAVES | Joseph Dumit

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