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Students in Professor Matt Malkan’s astronomy class get a close-up view of the universe in UCLA’s Visualization Portal.

UCLA students are taking field trips to the cathedrals in Spain and into the microscopic world of molecules – all while sitting comfortably in their seats here on campus.

The students are getting a first look at UCLA’s Visualization Portal, a virtual reality theater which uses a floor-to-ceiling spherical screen to overcome time and space.

The portal, hidden in the Math Science building, allows participants to experience the world as it appeared 800 years ago, or even magnified one million times inside the human body, depending on the model being run.

At one end of the portal is the Visualization Lab, a computer center boasting post-production video equipment and high-end workstations from Apple, SGI and IBM. These resources are available upon reservation and consultation with Academic Technology Services.

At the other end of the portal room is the Trimension Systems’ virtual reality display, a screen measuring 24 feet in diameter and eight feet high.

Three separate images may be displayed on the screen at once, or the operator can combine them into one continuous high-resolution image that pans around the audience.

An SGI computer sits in the control room, powering all this 3-D imagery. Four processors lie at the heart of this machine, which is also equipped with a vast array of professional graphics software programs.

“This kind of visualization helps researchers and students alike really see the data,” said Pieter Lechner, manager of the Visualization Portal. “You’ll get it a lot quicker looking at a model than reading about it in a textbook.”

Professors seem to agree. The simulation serves as a high point in Professor John Dagenais’ introductory course in medieval Spanish and as an ongoing research project for his summer-session students studying and traveling the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a historic cathedral in Northwestern Spain.

“You can talk and talk about how thick the walls of Romanesque cathedrals were, but that doesn’t do anything unless you go through and get a feel of what that meant,” Dagenais said. “With (the portal), you can actually go inside the wall and see for yourself how thick they are.”

The portal is a bridge connecting the world of research and education. It is a device that can display data in such a way that you can actually see the “bigger picture,” according to Lechner.

For example, long lists of numbers from brain scans are sometimes transformed into a picture of a brain, but using the portal they can be color-coded and made more easily understandable and aesthetically pleasing.

“We’re always looking for ways (other) than having just a big stack of numbers to show the data,” he added.

ATS also assists researchers and professors in creating more traditional video presentations.

The screens at the portal have been used in this way for ten years to display 2-D graphics and animations.

The Visualization Portal, however, is undergoing changes that will emphasize its use as a 3-D modeling tool rather than simply a media center.

The primary focus of the portal will shift, beginning to take full advantage of this unique, high-end technology to display UCLA research in a new and illuminating medium.

Students who have used the portal as part of their courses agree that the 3-D modeling technology is superior to more traditional lecture demonstrations as well. Several students even applauded Dagenais for taking advantage of a new technology he thought would improve their understanding.

“It’s an interactive experience; it feels like you are there,” said Abby Lievense, a fourth-year linguistics student who took Dagenais’ Spanish course. Lievense was shocked that such a lecture was even possible.

“It’s a different perspective, an interesting way to make the lecture better; you can really get a feel (for the location) more than you can with just a picture,” said Karin Drinkhall, a third-year Spanish student.

According to Dagenais, photographs from some of his students who visited Santiago de Compostela were actually used in the planning stages for the cathedral’s 3-D model, making the experience a truly interactive event.