In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A Network Monitoring Dome Decree – RIT professor displays Netcosm on 12′ immersive dome

By Brian Boyko
Part of the Netcosm project is the idea of being able to look at information in a new way. Netcosm took network monitoring data and made it more immersive. Now, with the help of Jon Schull, associate professor of IT at Rochester Institute of Technology, in conjunction with some of his students and peers, the Netcosm immersion experience has been taken to a new level.
“I’m sitting in a room right now,” Professor Schull said, “looking at a 12′ (in diameter) bubble-shaped tent, which has projections on all sides…. We’re doing research asking ourselves, what you could do with a multi-person, multimedia, immersive computer that surrounded many people. ”
The dome, which is being displayed Friday, May 11 at a Digital Arts competition at RIT, provides a 360 degree view, provided by multiple synchronized projection screens aligned along the compass points. And one of the applications they’ve chosen to feature is Netcosm.
“We have the Netcosm visualization running, and we say: ‘So this is what life inside the network is really like,’” Schull said. “I like to say that we’re immersed in a ‘transparent sea of cyberspace.’… you actually get the feeling you’re swimming among the packets, data, and network, that are normally invisible but are a major part of our world these days.”
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“I teach a course at RIT called ‘Innovation, Invention, and Improvisation.’ Each quarter, I take advanced students from all sorts of disciplines and I get together with them, and I try to come up with something that seems possible but that none of us know how to do. This year, that’s what I chose, and we figured it out. And it works very well.”
“NetQoS was great. We were able to tell them what the requirements of our system were, and they delivered us a custom version of Netcosm in a matter of hours after we agreed on the conditions.”
Dr. Schull, a specialist in human/computer interaction, says he’s been interested in information visualization and the entire notion of augmenting human cognitive abilities.
“There’s a sense in which this may just be a prototype for the kind of augmented reality that we anticipate ten or fifteen years from now,” said Professor Schull, “where you look at a wall surface and your eyeglasses will superimpose images onto it. The point is, you don’t have to wait 15 years, you can start prototyping and experimenting and getting a lot of bang for the buck from some new configurations that we’re playing around with.”
“People walk in and say, ‘Oh, wow!’ Then they ask what the practical applications are. Well, suppose you’re a brain surgeon and you want to take a flight through the brain before doing an operation? Suppose you’re a crime scene investigator and you want to reconstruct the scene of the crime. Or you’re a security expert, and you want to experiment with lines of sight and escape routes – or you’re an architect or a landscaper, and you want to show your client what kind of thing you have in mind. If everyone could do this, it would become one of the standard tools of working with computers and working with reality.”
More than just a mere toy, Dr. Schull hopes that the project will be commercially viable.
“We are very interested in collaboration and exploring new applications… We’re quite eager to have people come forward with propositions for commercial, artistic or other experimental applications that can demonstrate what you can do, or what you might do.”
Dr. Schull will also show the dome – with Netcosm – to the New Media Consortium Conference in Indianapolis in June.