April 2008 - The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $920,000 to the KeckCAVES group to support a project entitled "CI-TEAM Implementation Project: Enabling Interactive Visual Exploration and Remote Collaboration for the Geosciences and Physical Sciences." The 3-year project began April 1, 2008 under the direction of Louise H. Kellogg, Bernd Hamann, Dawn Y. Sumner, James P. Crutchfield, Magali I. Billen, Eric Cowgill, and Oliver Kreylos. The project is funded by the NSF's program "Cyberinfrastructure Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring for Our 21st Century Workforce (CI-TEAM)." The project will develop the KeckCAVES software for training and education.

IEEE Virtual Reality 2008 Conference in Reno, NV: Oliver Kreylos, Eric Cowgill, and Magali Billen will offer a tutorial on "Virtual Reality in the Physical Sciences", Sunday March 9th, 1:30pm - 5:00pm

Oliver Kreylos and Gerald Bawden were featured on Capitol Public Radio's Insight program with Jeffrey Callison. The show is titled: 3D Geology and aired on March 4, 2008.

The first presentation of the Spring '08 Sacramento State STEM Public Lecture Series will take place on Tuesday, March 4th at 7:30 pm in the University Union Ballroom 1. The title of the talk is "View the world through... Disaster Vision" presented by Dr. Gerald Bawden from the United States Geological Survey California Water Science Center located on the Sacramento State campus. The audience will wear 3D glasses and view laser scan imagery of natural disasters including Earthquakes and Landslides. Dr. Gerald Bawden is a research geophysicist who studies the mechanisms that drive natural and human-induced disasters. He is the Chief Scientist of the US Geological Survey's Western Remote Sensing and Visualization Center located on the Sacramento State campus. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Geology Department at Sacramento State, a UC Davis Research Associate in the Department of Geology, and a participant in the W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Dr. Bawden received his Bachelor of Science in Geology from UC Santa Barbara, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Geology from UC Davis. His research uses satellite, airborne, and ground-based surveying techniques to measure changes in the earth's surface associated with land subsidence, earthquakes, and volcanic activity.

Professor Magali Billen has been awarded a prestigious NSF grant from the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program, which is committed to encouraging faculty to practice, and academic institutions to value, integration of research and education. The grant will fund research into the processes that cause subduction to fail: plateau collision with a trench and detachment of crustal fragments from the subducting plate. A key component of the grant will be to develop interactive visualization tools to help improve students 3D visualization and interpretation skills. These new tools will use the 3D output of research models as data for students to learn how 3D structures within the crust appear in 2D map sections with real topography. The visualization tool will allow the student to explore both the surface exposure of structure, as they would find them in the field, and the underlying 3D structure, which they would normally have to infer from the surface exposure in the field. The new visualization tool will build on the existing Vrui Toolbox and 3D Visualizer software.

KeckCAVES presents at the Fall 2007 AGU Conference
KeckCAVES scientists will present abstracts on analysis of 3-D and 4-D LiDAR data and on building fault models in interactive immersive environments at the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco

KeckCAVES Hosts IEEE Visualization Conference
The KeckCAVES, IDAV, and the UltraVis Lab co-hosted a "Halloween@UC Davis" open house for visitors from the IEEE Visualization 2007 Conference. About 200 visitors came through the labs to experience our state-of-the-art visualization and enjoy Halloween treats and conversation.

KeckCAVES participates in Arts-Science-Technology Collaboration
COLLAPSE (suddenly falling down) is a new work by choreographer and Professor of Theater and Dance Della Davidson, in collaboration with geologists Louise Kellogg and Dawn Sumner, computer scientists Michael Neff and Oliver Kreylos, physicist Jim Crutchfield, and USGS geologist Gerald Bawden, with text by Ed Gaible. From the collapse of the social order in Rwanda, to the twin towers falling and the ice caps melting into the sea, we fear the disintegration of the systems upon which we depend. Performed by Sideshow Physical Theatre in a joint production with Mondavi Center, this unique collaboration between artists and scientists uses computer-generated images in an interactive environment to illustrate how systems fail and patterns reorganize. The piece was commissioned by the Mondavi Center as part of the Creativity Project, a year-long event that celebrates the work and spirit of choreographer Merce Cunningham, who has been in the forefront of using technological systems to explore choreographic ideas. COLLAPSE ran October 25-28 and November 1-4, 2007 in Mondavi Center Studio Theatre.
Department of Theatre and Dance COLLAPSE site | Egghead Blog | Information and Educational Technology TechNews

UCD Geology Goes Virtual
The KeckCAVES CAVE was installed during April 2005, and has been fully functional since before the installation team left. We are currently in the process of planning and/or installing several additional VR environments at participating units. We already have highly interactive visualization applications for a variety of earth science problems, and are in the process of developing more. One particular application (RIMS) that was created during the first stages of the KeckCAVES project (before there was a CAVE) is being used heavily for neotectonic mapping in its desktop incarnation, and will be available in the CAVE soon.