Those are just two of the possible uses later this year of the immersive lab, which is only one room in Atkinson Hall, home of the UCSD Division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. The technology is so advanced that, in some cases, it is unclear exactly how it will be used.

The award-winning 215,000-sf building is located in a new engineering quad, along with the bioengineering and computer science departments.

"It is both a challenge and an opportunity to be surrounded by such distinguished departments," says Dr. Ramesh Rao, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and division director of Calit2 in San Diego. "It teaches us what academic excellence is all about."

Calit2 is not a department itself, however, which presents a cultural challenge for the approximately 150 professors from 23 departments who work there, along with students, researchers, and 100 core technical and administrative staff.

"At full occupancy we will have 900 individuals in this building," says Rao. "This is by no means a group who knew each other while the building was being designed, or knew exactly who was going to fit in where. It's tempting to build your own little fortress, because you can control your environment. We did quite the opposite."

"What we have are many people who will have offices and wet labs in their department and come here to interact with people whose disciplines are completely different, and to use unique facilities," says Dr. Larry Smarr, founding director of Calit2 and the Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.

The institute received its original funding six years ago, when state officials and Richard C. Atkinson, then president of the University of California system, launched an initiative to create a permanent framework for interdisciplinary collaboration among the 30,000 professors on 10 UC campuses. They include researchers in the physical sciences, but also those in the social, ethical, and humanities fields who are trying to get early views of how the world is going to change.

"As we go to wireless feeding global photonic networks, you are going to see vast changes in things such as transportation, environmental monitoring, civil infrastructure, medicine, and entertainment," predicts Rao.

The base structure of the one-year-old building creates a footprint that is unique to the first floor. Two wings extend from the core, one containing the nanotechnology cleanrooms and the other containing new media facilities.

That floor is topped by a five-story rectangular tower, which contains offices on floors two through four, along with specialized labs on five and six. A fluid-shaped outer structure wraps around the tower and houses the "neighborhoods," where researchers work side-by-side with unlikely collaborators in a continual space without walls.

"No one can tell where the boundaries are," says Rao.

Ghosts and Nano Science

Three spaces comprise the media arts wing, the largest of which is a 2,000-sf, 200-seat digital cinema. This is not a theater where the guests sit passively and observe. Each seat is equipped with power and gigabit networking. Because it is digital, there are no film projectors; instead, there is a state-of-the-art Sony 4K, which produces four times the resolution of the best HDTV. Along with ultra-high-capacity Internet connectivity, it can be used to create a new sense of telepresence. It was used recently to teleconference with the president of India.

"The feeling is hard to describe in words," says Rao. "It is an experiential thing when you have this sort of resolution."

The auditorium also is equipped with 22 channels of sound, even though no commercial system yet exists that can produce a 22-channel source.

"We have professors in music who, along with their students, are exploring what one might be able to accomplish with this kind of capability," he says. "We have to do it by hand now, but they are building software solutions."

Next to the digital cinema is the 900-sf multipurpose room, which is completely flexible in its configuration. It is a basic "black box" theater, with all the 100 removable seats on the same level. Smarr describes it as the place "where you get to dance with the ghosts," where artists can interact with virtual representations of individuals in other locations.

"This is the most experimental of our performance spaces," says Rao.

The immersive lab, perhaps the most other-worldly space, has generated many innovations in the building's first year.

"We have had at least three or four examples of people literally running into each other and discovering that somebody has the data but doesn't know how to visualize it, and someone else who knows how to do visualization and is happy to have new data to work with," says Rao. "This is where a lot of those chance interactions have taken place. People walk in for some random reason, they see what we have, and they come back and say, 'I've got some content for you.'"

The centerpiece of the 900-sf room will be an 11-foot translucent cube with images projected on five of the surfaces, everywhere except the surface behind the person standing inside the cube.

"The philosophy behind this is to engage the right side of the brain for scientific discoveries," explains Rao.

Researchers can visualize the morphology of a cancer cell by standing inside the cell. In medical research, doctors can manipulate the features of the human body; possibly explore a patient's spine from all angles before they actually operate on it.

"It's like holding it in your hand without holding it in your hand," he says.

Architects can use the cube to visualize their buildings in 3D; add audio, and they can hear how sound travels through the building.

The motion capture lab has a dance floor, acoustic walls, and lights and cameras installed in a prescribed rigid arrangement to create a synthetic model for human movement. An audio chamber has no parallel walls, so it creates no standard sound waves.

The polar opposite, left-brain activity is served by the class 100 and class 1,000 nanotechnology cleanrooms in the other wing of the first floor, where physicists, chemists, material scientists, and engineers have created a new community of researchers. At first, this was very much an arranged marriage.

"The cultural aspect of getting them all to work together was no small undertaking," admits Rao. "This group at first came to me with their divorce papers outlining how, if the arrangement isn't working out at the end of a year, they would divide up the space and the equipment. I had to say to them, 'You have to plan for success, not for failure.' It took three years for them to come together and agree on the terms by which that space would be used. Now it is an open facility, where scientists pay an hourly rate to explore whatever innovation they want. It's not just for campus users, but off-campus users, as well."

Who's New in the Neighborhood?

The amorphous spaces in the tower contain the scientific equivalent of "planned neighborhoods," with Rao acting as the city planner.

"I engage with two dozen groups who need space, and I group them together to create synergies," he says.

For example, an engineering group is collecting data from seismic arrays to determine how buildings stand up to seismic shocks. They can make use of the various visualization capabilities in the first-floor media labs. Another group is building massive video walls to improve the man-machine interface. Scientists working on the protein databank can bring data up on that wall. A group working with the physical layers of high speed optical communications is sitting next to people who are finding innovative ways to make use of this high speed connectivity.

All the space is assigned not to departments but to research groups who have a vision, a plan, and funding. Rao initially received about 50 requests for space in the building, three to five times the space available. In order to satisfy the need, he first recognized that not everybody needed to recreate everything inside their own space, and that there are shared spaces in this building that can serve everybody's needs.

"The neighborhoods create adjacencies that made sense for the kinds of things they knew they were going to be doing, and the kinds of things we wanted them to do," he says. "Practically everybody had a lot of ideas of what they wanted their space to look like, but I don't think one group wanted to know who their neighbors were going to be. That was where I got to exercise my creative control. How do you create these neighborhoods so that they will be doing new things over time?"

The neighborhoods change as researchers come and go, or find synergies Rao had not anticipated. To facilitate that, most of the furniture is on wheels and is easily moved.

"This is not cubicle city," he says. "It is a very organic layout."

How do you measure the success of something this organic? Since its inception, 10 companies have been created and fostered by work done at Calit2.  A half-dozen newly recruited professors chose to come to UCSD because of the facilities that Calit2 offers.

The state put up $100 million to build Calit2's Division building at UCSD and another facility like it in Irvine to house the Calit2 UCI Division, but the University had to match the grant two-to-one from federal and private-industry sources. More than 130 companies are working with the University, between the two campuses, bringing with them $80 million. Over 300 federal grants can be linked directly to Calit2. That totals more than $300 million in federal activity in the last six years.

"When you attempt to reach out and engage with so many people on campus, there has to be some hard reasons why they will step outside of their comfort zones and try to play together in this new space," says Rao. "What we did in Calit2 was create these remarkable new experimental facilities that nobody could recreate inside their own departmental spaces."

By Lisa Wesel

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