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- Well thank you very much, and I'm glad that at least the last presentation we mentioned pre-recorded media because that's actually what I am going to talk about. So in spite of all the wonderful conversations around interactive content, I actually just wanted to share some observations about how we choose to create content for a very specific kind of environment, namely, Morrison Planetarium, and the shows that we create. There's a connection to some of the more traditional media that we've talked about. Videos and other representations that are an interactive setting, but what is important to note about this space, and this is Morrison Planetarium. Typically when you visit there are actually people in the seats. It seats 290 people. It's a 75 foot, 23 meter, if you're civilized, diameter dome, tilted at 30 degrees, and when you're seated in it, this immersive space fills your field of view. So it's not unlike the science on a sphere. It's not a convex sphere, it's a concave sphere, with images projected inside it, and so we can actually run things in real time, or as a pre-recorded mode. I'm going to fucus a little bit more on pre-recorded, and what I'd like to share are some my thoughts on how we structure story. Although I actually prefer term "Narrative Journey" for this environment. Now this is informed a lot by Ben Shedd, a filmmaker who has created many immersive IMAX experiences, and who really gave a lot of thought to what he called exploding the frame. Leaving the framed experience of film behind. To think about instead of the cuts and structure of film narrative that are very well developed after more than a century of filmmaking, thinking about how the action instead of taking place on a screen, is really taking place on the visitor's side, on the experiential side of the person who is in this immersive space, it feels like they are traveling, and so the context of this for us is that we want to take them on a journey, and the example that one narrator of a show gave is that he actually kind of felt that maybe he was sitting next to the person just describing what they are seeing telling a story that connects these various locations in space and time that you visit in this environment. So just as a word of context, this is a very traditional looking planetarium image, in that we have a nice image of Jupiter up there, but the context of this I'd just like to remind, especially for those who may have not been to the California Academy of Sciences before, this is the largest green building in the world, open to the public, opened a little over ten years ago. This is the context for our planetarium. We are a Life Sciences Institution that does research for the past 163 years, and if you were to settle down the rooftop, the planetarium is actually a major architectural feature. It's under that disc dome in the distance, across the piazza. We have an Italian architect, so we have a piazza. Of the space, and I like to think this environment as we've talked about the kinds of stories we tell. We tell a lot of stories that are not just space science. We tell stories about, as you heard in my brief bio, about things like earthquakes, ecosystems, and in our most current show about coral reefs. As so this is as we've worked together, and the team that's created these shows has really worked together for almost that full decade. These are just some of the kind of design principles that have or really kind of values that have driven how we approach telling stories. So I'm going to go through this piece by piece. I'll just note too that presented a great poster last night that talks about sort of the mechanics of how you can piece together these narrative these immersive pieces. This is a little bit going a little bit more specifically into almost what I would think of a conservative approach to how to tell science stories, science narrative journeys in a way that the audience can really absorb, take in, and take away from that experience. So, first and foremost, we try to tell human-centered stories. Now, that's not human-centered in the same way we've talked about people being able to control the data that they are seeing potentially about themselves in an interactive way, because again we've got 290 people in this space. We're taking everyone on sort of the same trip. So, we just have to think about how do we bring people into the story? You can't really put people on the dome. They're big. They're scary. It's not, we're actually going to do that in our next show. But it's not the most comfortable kind of thing. So, we try to take them to places, and again with the viewer as the main kind of character in this experience. We do things like we take them to San Francisco in 1906. This was for our show about earthquakes. We're a planetarium in San Francisco. There was no way we could create a show about earthquakes without recreating the 1906 earthquake. So, this is actually, well you'll see more about this in a moment, but an insanely detailed historical recreation of the intersection of California and Market streets not too far from here. When we're dealing with more abstract data, for example we have a show about asteroids, and the trajectory you see coming from the upper right down to the middle of the screen is actually the re-creation of the Tunguska meteor that entered the atmosphere over Siberia. San Francisco is not located in Siberia, but we overlaid after seeing this in a very abstract terrain. First of all that kind of blueish area is the region where people were injured, 1,000 people suffered injuries due to this, and to give context, we placed this map of actually San Francisco, we also did New York and Tokyo, to give a context for how large this area is. And although these are not humans, they nonetheless have faces, and people love faces. We are genetically programmed to look at faces, so theses beautiful little sea otters, who are in our show "Habitat Earth" about ecosystems on Earth, immediately draw your eyes, especially with their nice white little faces with dark eyes, dark nose, you just go right to them. So, we try to bring these living creatures in to our environments, and this is another way to allow people to connect to topics that can be very abstract. So the scene right after this we go into a network diagram of the food web in this environment of a kelp forest just off shore of California, and by connecting this to these sort of animated characters, you can really create more of a connection to this otherwise sort of abstract diagram. So, as a corollary to that, we actually also, because if you can imagine, when yo take your seat in this 290 seat theater, 23 meters across and you're in this kind of weird place. Many people have not had an experience in that environment previously. So, when we start our shows, we always start at a human scale, and that then allows us to travel out to, out to or in to, different scales and different experiences. The planetarium is an amazing space to experience scale changes. So, we want to start at a human scale, just so people can become familiar and comfortable with that space. So, this is actually a snapshot from our realtime software. So, when we begin our tour of the universe program, which we do typically every day at 4:30, this is a presentation done by a presenter who just starts describing maybe current science, whatever, takes you out to the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is actually where I'll end this talk, but we start with the International Space Station. This is the size of a football field. People are inside that. So, you can at least make that connection to an otherwise very abstract and grandiose tour. For our show, "Life a Cosmic Story" which is about the origin of life on Earth, we start it in a redwood forest. Now, I will step through here just a couple images. So, if you look at one of the leaves over there on the right hand side. We actually zoom into one of those leaves into a stoma. We fly through the stoma to see the interior cell structure. That's actually in an image that Jennifer presented, and yeah cells, and into basically the surface of a thylakoid, where we actually see the molecules engaged in photosynthesis, and we do that, and I'll mention a kind of next value for this, which is we do this in a continuous way, so that you experience the shift in 12 orders of magnitude of scale in a continuous fashion. For our show "Earthquake" we actually start on the beach not too far North of here. This is DeColores beach, and then lift off to reveal the San Andreas fault which cuts just East of that beach. For our show about asteroids and comets, we start with this charismatic little lizard that's on a rock near Meteor Crater in Arizona, and we also thought it was a nice little nod to not his direct ancestors, the dinosaurs, but enough of a visual reference of the kind of dinosaur connection that it was an interesting place to start the story, but we lift off from this location to then reveal Meteor Crater and then the location of other craters in North America. So, starting at a scale that is familiar and human, before going to a scale that is more abstract, but I should note too that these have been snapshots that are sort of a crop of that giant immersive space. So, typically we're showing a much larger environment. The bottom of the screen corresponds to the front of the dome. The top to the back of the dome, and then so basically this sort of sphere is wrapping around you, and this creates huge cognitive load. You have to take in this huge space, you feel like you're traveling through space. You're hearing some narrator yammer at you about science. You're hearing a soundtrack that may include sound effects and music, and you have to try to create some kind of coherent story from this. So, the second value that I really wanted to focus on is how we try to minimize the cognitive load, and create something that is as comfortable as possible for our viewers. So, the first example I'd like to give is from our show "Earthquake". I already mentioned that we, in one scene, actually start in San Francisco, so you're going to see that same dome master, that same circle over in the left hand side of the screen, as well as a little supporting information on the right hand side. I will not narrate it, except I will be narrating it.

- [Narrator] The film was created for a 75 foot diameter 4K tilted dome using six video projectors blended seamlessly to create an immersive experience. The bottom of the fisheye corresponds to the front of the theater, while the top of the image lies behind the audience. A science based re-creation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake begins with a street scene based on both historical and modern photography. Historical insurance maps provide critical information about construction materials that allow buildings to respond accurately to ground motion driven by supercomputer simulation data. Photo reference guides hand animation of buckling rails and slumping streets and sidewalks. Dynamic fracturing of individual buildings and falling and tumbling debris also follow historical evidence. Pulling away to a more stylized than diagrammatic appearance makes use of a procedurally created cityscape based on the known street grid. This shift also allows audiences to gain an emotional distance after the street level visceral earthquake simulation. The animation of areas effected by fires erupting in the wake of the earthquake is based on historical data on how the fire spread. Custom software integrated high resolution satellite and aerial geographic data into a generalized but flexible Earth-rendering package. From a regional perspective, we re-create the event to address the underlying science. We begin with the supercomputer simulation showing slip along the San Andreas Fault, seen in yellow, as well as calculated surface shaking intensity, seen in red. Note that the fault plane rupture now subtends approximately 120 degrees of the audience's field of view. Moving farther beneath Earth's surface, we reveal a second supercomputer simulation showing the surface shaking on a global scale emanating from San Francisco. The same simulation provided data showing seismic wave propagation into Earth's mantle. The depiction of the mantle cross section is colored based on temperature variation derived from tomographic analysis of systemic data. An additional data layer shows the location of tectonic plate boundaries projected onto Earth's surface.

- So, I think the point I wanted to make with that, and I hope you can understand why I didn't try to narrate that in real time, is and by the way that played over two minutes. The entire sequence in the dome is actually is a little over three minutes, so we sped it up for this, but that continuity, from the surface of basically streets near here, out to a truly global scale, allows us to create connections that just wouldn't be possible in other ways. So, then my last point, and this I think is very consistent with a lot of discussions that we've had, which is, we have a lot of novice visualization experiencers coming in to these spaces. So, how do we insure, or at least do our best to make sure that the visualizations that we present are easy to read? That again going back to this conative load - got a lot of stuff coming at you. How do you make it as simple as possible to make your point with the visualizations, and so we end up almost kind of being almost insipid in the way we simplify visualizations. This is one of the more complex, because we actually had two datasets that we wanted to show at the same time, and so we color-coded them very distinctly. I'm colorblind, so I'm a perfect guineapig for figuring out what we can and can't do, but trying to keep rather than most representations that you see from this from the USGS would be beautifully multicolored and fancy. No, monochromatic, red is shaking a lot, clear is not. Yellow is the slip along the fault plane. Trying to keep the representation as simple and straightforward as possible. We've already seen a lot of air currents represented in the program today. From our show about coral reefs, we illustrate water currents. Again, not color coating temperature. Not color coating anything. The point is currents. We just show the currents and give them motion in the show. The image on my badge, which no one came over to ask me about last night, is the evolution of the solar system very early in the history of the solar system the outer planets did wacky stuff that tossed most of the small scale objects in the outer solar system out of the solar system. This is a single frame of a simulation we showed. The color coating is very subtle. We basically just wanted to make sure that it was as readable as possible, and finally, as promised, the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is where we end our tour of the universe. Well, we take people home after they see it. This is the most distant light collected by astronomers. The variations, are not it's not a map of light the way or an image like most of the images we've seen today. This is actually a very high-contrast image that shows the variation. Bright sections are warm parts of the early universe, dark sections are cool parts. When you look at the image from NASA, this is color coated with yellow is the median value. Red is the high values. Blue is the low values. Close enough for a rainbow color pallet for me to be somewhat nauseated by it. So, when we show this in our planetarium, we take it back down, it becomes much more easy to explain when you can just talk about bright versus dark areas. So, just to recap, the kind of values that we try to put into our content, is really to create human-centered stories, in particular because of the immersive environment of the planetarium that's so great at showing scale, but still could really be disorientating if you don't know where you are in that scale transition we start at a human scale. We try to minimize the cognitive load of our audiences by ensuring continuity in our movement through environments and by trying to keep the visual representations that we use either photo-real or when we're visualizing data to keep them as easy to read as possible. So, thank you very much.