Oliver Kreylos, Ph.D. - US grants

Planning Grant to Support the Development of the Project ?Visualization as a Tool in Informal Science Education at Lake Tahoe?

Summary:

Researchers at the U.C. Davis will carry out observations of museum visitors to plan for a study of how visualizations affect visitors of an Earth Sciences exhibit using 3D technology. The researchers will be able to conduct an experimental study about how much participants in an education center learn from the model of earthquakes and of a model of the Lake Tahoe basin. The researchers will conduct a quasi-experiment of a sample of 100 visitors to the center at Lake Tahoe to study their experience with visualization and learning of science. The funding for this phase of the project will include the development of audience surveys, conducting focus groups to develop types of feedback, train staff to conduct data collection, and to conduct a literature review of technology visualization.

One of the fundamental challenges in the study of past climate change in Earth history is how to reconstruct and compare past ocean circulation (as derived from sparse geochemical data collected from fossils in deep-sea sedimentary cores) with modern ocean circulation (as constructed from modern oceanographic observations and computer simulations) to yield insight into the differences and processes governing ocean circulation throughout the last glacial cycle from 150,000 years ago to the present. Similarly, a major challenge in computer science is how to extract information from sparse datasets, and how to effectively combine computational thinking with automated data analysis, to extract new knowledge about features and processes. Our multidisciplinary and multi-institutional project brings together a team of computer scientists, physical oceanographers, paleoceanographers, and computational geophysicists to address these challenges. We are developing an innovative suite of computational tools to explore past changes in global ocean circulation by allowing researchers to interact with data in a 3-dimensional environment across a geologically relevant time domain (the 4th dimension). This project will merge analysis of ocean flow with 40 years of previously-collected geochemical data from deep-sea sedimentary cores in order to gain new insights into past ocean circulation change. Our research will take advantage of the unique analytical resources and interdisciplinary collaborative environment provided by the UC Davis KeckCAVES (W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences). The KeckCAVES provides immersive interactive visualization technologies that help scientists identify meaningful patterns in complex datasets. In this unique collaborative environment, we are developing methods to improve data interpolation, to extract ocean flow patterns, and to characterize ocean flow over time for potential change detection, along with interactive means of visualizing and interacting with those large and time-dependent datasets. The computational methods developed in this project are adaptable to a wide range of visualization and data-analysis applications for analysis of flow fields. The scientific visualization methods we develop will be used to develop innovative, provocative, and intuitive instructional materials for undergraduate and graduate education; for making other researchers familiar with new scientific methodology (visually-aided analysis); for bringing science and scientific results to the public; and for bringing interactive scientific visualization technology to all of the partner institutions in this collaborative project.

How do people learn large-scale spaces, like new towns and cities that they visit, as they navigate? Addressing this question poses surprising obstacles, such as the difficulty in optimizing large-scale spaces for experimental testing and controlling for pre-existing knowledge. Desktop virtual reality offers one possible way to address this question, although such testing offers an incomplete rendition of the full-body, immersive experience that is real-world navigation. Researchers will develop a 2-D treadmill coupled with a head-mounted display to allow free ambulation of large-scale virtual spaces. Successful development of this device has important societal applications. For example, pre-training with enriched body-based cues has the potential to increase knowledge transfer to real world environments, which could be helpful for training individuals such as first-responders and navigation in wilderness environments. Also, the device and proposed experiments will provide a completely novel understanding of the neural basis of human spatial navigation with body-based cues, fundamental to accurately modeling spatial cognition and understanding why we often get lost when we visit new cities.

Almost all theories of the neural basis of spatial navigation, largely developed in freely navigating rodents, assume the critical importance of importance of body-based cues to this code. Yet the vast majority of studies in humans involve navigation in desktop virtual reality. The novel device that will be developed will permit 2-D locomotion-based VR navigation, allowing a full range of body/head rotations and ambulation. The experiments will determine 1) the contributions of body-based input to human spatial navigation and how navigation in VR with body-based can enhance subsequent knowledge of real world environments 2) how the brain codes spatial distance by employing simultaneous EEG recordings 3) how the brain codes the relative directions of landmarks in the environment by modeling the underlying multidimensional brain networks using high-resolution functional magnetic imaging (fMRI). The outcomes from these experiments will be important to testing models of spatial navigation and advancing our understanding of the extent to which we employ visual vs. body-based cues to represent spatial environments, currently an issue of significant debate in the field.