• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

  PATIL ARMENIAN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff The UCLA Visualization Center in the basement of the Geology building is closing after four years because it was losing money.

By Barbara Ortutay

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The UCLA Visualization Center closed its doors permanently Thursday for financial reasons after four years in existence.

The center, located in the basement of the Geology Building, served students, faculty and researchers in various departments, providing multimedia resources for presenting data visually.

“I regret having to do it, but at some point there are certain things it’s just not possible to have available,” said Roberto Peccei, dean of physical sciences and vice chancellor of research. “The center has been losing money for a long time.”

“The question is whether this really high-end service could be subsidized at the level it has been,” he continued.

Funded through grants and the physical sciences division of the College of Letters and Science, it cost more than $100,000 to keep the center open each year, Peccei said.

The center provided facilities for data imaging, animation and image processing, among other things.

It is not going to reopen, but according to its director, Bruce McCrimmon, the university plans to provide the resources it offered in other ways.

But students, researchers and faculty who used the center to prepare class projects and presentations said they regret the closing.

“I’m extremely concerned because I think we’re losing a resource. The slack won’t easily be taken up by someone else,” said Anne McGlynn, senior editor of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

Before the center closed, McGlynn said she used its lab a couple of times per month for the expertise and resources, which included an audio-video facility and a poster printer.

“(The staff) is extremely knowledgeable about Adobe products and have a keen interest in the program. They go the extra mile,” she said.

The center opened at its current location in 1996, but served UCLA for years before that, according to McCrimmon. Open five days a week, the center served departments ranging from engineering to physical sciences to architecture. According to the center’s Web site, the focus of visualization is to present non-visual data as images for better understanding.

“The images created may serve to represent things not readily observed by the naked eye: molecules, galaxies, alien life forms and so forth,” the site states.