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Ricardo Ballesteros and Alex Theodosopoulos work on creating animations on the large screens of the BURECS media lab.
Photo by M. O'Hanlon
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BU's High-tech Interns
The stark white walls of the BURECS media lab are covered in
monitors—everywhere you look, a reflection is staring back at you
from the black screens. At times, they are decorated with ultra high-resolution
panoramic images of Antarctica’s dry valleys. Most days—and
at curious times of the night—this is where one can catch a
sandy-haired, hippie-looking, vegetarian named Keith Heyward, who works as the
BURECS media guru. This summer, he’s hosting four of the program’s
students.
These students are at home inside this futuristic control
center. A different gadget lies on each table—an Oculus Rift
here, a drone used for aerial photography there. Despite the room’s
imposing digital capacity, the students seem laid back and comfortable, a
demeanor they seem to have adopted from the man in charge.
Right now, the interns are editing and adding visual aids to
their “TedTalks”—videos that were created by the
BURECS students last fall. These 2-3 minute presentations cover short
explanations of environmental topics ranging from ocean currents to solar
effects on Earth’s climate. According to the interns,
the process of creating the animations for these videos is slow because of all
the minuscule details. Two of the interns working on the video, Danielle Letsche and Praveen Menon, have a five-minute
conversation about the exact timing of the animation of rain falling from a
cloud. In another corner of the room, Ricardo Ballesteros drags a window from a
computer monitor onto a digital drawing pad while Alex Theodosopoulos tells him
which of the many Illustrator tools to use.
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Animation of the conveyor belt theory taken from
Praveen Menon's video on ocean currents.
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Although Heyward initially guided them, the students took over
the learning process after the first week and are now mostly self-guided. They’ve
learned how to use all the software in Adobe Creative Cloud and are now easily
moving between Photoshop, After Effects and other programs, competently
creating animations of the scientific processes the students talked about in
their videos. “Concepts like the one Praveen describes in his video would
be very difficult to visualize without animations,” said Letsche of the usefulness
of their work. In that particular video, red and blue animated arrows have been
drawn on a picture of the globe in order to demonstrate the circulation of hot
and cold waters across the oceans. According to the interns, visuals such as
this facilitate comprehension for an audience lacking a scientific background
and help to promote engagement throughout the two to three minute videos. “If
the videos are short and concise with lots of visuals, then they can be a
really useful tool,”
said Theodosopoulos. “The faster that we can get the point
across, the more useful the videos will be to educate a general audience.”
Beyond educating the public about scientific phenomena, science communications
tools such as these can be used to facilitate the process of scientific
research. The students are excited to learn about several new technologies
Heyward has been experimenting with in recent months.
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Praveen Menon and Alex Theodosopoulos
discuss the number of photographs of the rock
that they need to take from different angles.
Photo by M. O'Hanlon
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At the moment, Heyward is preparing to photograph rocks from
Antarctica in order to create high-resolution 3D models. These rocks were
gathered from dozens of field missions to the Antarctic Dry Valleys. Here at
BU, they are stored along
with ancient Antarctic ice and volcanic ash
in the basement of BU’s College of Arts and Sciences in a
large room known as “Little Antarctica”.
Currently, the lack of a photographic organization system makes it difficult to
locate these rock samples within the room’s labyrinthine
shelving system. “I want create a digital database for
research use,” said
Heyward of this plan to photograph and catalog the rocks. Once complete, each
3D model would include a spreadsheet of its specific characteristics— information like the date it was
collected, an estimate of its age, mineral composition, and the GPS location
from which it was collected.
In addition to creating animations, Heyward has other big plans
for his interns this summer that include updating his website, buriedice.com,
which hosts a collection of panoramic images taken in Antarctica. Heyward says
that he intends to add more text to his site to make it tour-like. Although it
features stunning panoramic images of the Antarctic Dry Valleys, he says it
lacks the content to make sense of the images it features. Eventually, Heyward
and his interns will also experiment with drones to capture images for more
extensive panoramas to be featured on this website. He hopes to create a
high-resolution, Google Earth-type of experience where a user can zoom in on a
specific rock to examine it. Heyward thinks that this method has the potential
to be used as an alternative to hiking around the vast continent of Antarctica to
collect data.
The information provided by these 3D images and panoramas would
be of use scientists attempting to replicate experiments done in the BURECS
lab. “In general, scientists’ methods aren’t
well-documented,”
Heyward said, “this has been a recent issue in the
news.”As a program that stresses the unity in science between
research, education, and communication, BURECS has made it a goal to find
solutions to problems such as this. This issue, which is becoming known as the “Replication
Crisis” has
gained recent attention in the media as a problem across all scientific fields.
“More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to
reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to
reproduce their own experiments,”
said writer and editor, Monya Baker, for Nature Magazine in a recent story
featured their website. Although “less than 31% [of scientists] think
that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably
wrong,” the
story reports, this issue still highlights the lack of effective communication
between scientists in their respective fields.
Although Heyward’s interns are just beginning to dip
their toes into the waters of scientific media, they are well aware that the
work done in BURECS has the potential to come up with innovative strategies for
problem solving. As they begin work using communication technologies to aid in
the education and documentation of science, they will be breaking ground in
making science not only accessible, but attractive to mainstream audiences.
This time-lapse video record by Ricardo Ballesteros displays
the intricate set-up process for 3D modeling.
