Option

I am interested in the Natural Resources Planning and Interpretation option

Reasons and General Area of Research Interest

There have been two constants in my life. The vast, beautiful western lands of North America and the presence of computer environments. On occasion I have been deeply involved in computer environments inside little structures on mountains and in deep forests. At these times I would take a break and step outside for the view. The contrast could be shocking. I would like the dividing line between these two worlds to disappear for the benefit of both.

I believe that companion computer generated environments which can be ultimately superimposed over nature at will, represent a possible advancement of our ability to experience hidden aspects of the land and deal with the building torrent of environmental data which threatens to overwhelm us.

I am not proposing to turn nature into a virtual reality ride. I believe a new class of powerful, immersive, visualization tools is needed for improved understanding of natural systems in the face of possible danger to the smooth functioning of those same systems upon which our survival, happiness and comfort depend.

This is useful and interesting work with applicability in many branches of science. It is the natural outgrowth of GIS, remote sensing, database science, data acquisition, and multimedia graphics. We do all of those things at HSU and I hope that there could be a home for this proposed project at Humboldt State.

The Type of Project I am Interested in

I would like to take two real life locations that hold special value to me as subjects, and build virtual worlds that emulate them. The first area is the ridge between Horse Mountain and Grouse Mountain near Berry Summit on highway 299. This ridge is interesting because it has a patchwork of human uses and owners. There are roads, radio installations, shooting ranges, meadows, quarries and many features typifying heavy use of the land. The ridge is also botanically interesting, has winter snow and is easy to get to from Arcata, allowing relatively frequent visits for data acquisition. Developing three dimensional graphical display strategies for these landscape attributes and conditions presents an interesting challenge in programming, cognitive science, and database design.

The second of the two locations is the Arcata wastewater treatment plant and its adjoining salt marshes and tidal lands. The plant is a collection of both biological machines, and traditional machines. Developing display conventions that convey engineering data linked with an underlying environmental database would be an interesting challenge. Does the oxidation pond machine at the treatment plant have more in common with the mountain meadow on the ridge or the mechanical clarifier tank elswhere at the plant? I hope to develop a graphical language that can embrace all three.

How can this project be practical without a team of people and hundreds of thousands of dollars?

The answer is that it wouldn't have been 18 or 24 months ago. I visited the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington and a number of other virtual reality functions in past years. They all reeked of big money and displayed an obvious expenditure of thousands of hours of programming time to make anything interesting move around in your VR goggles.

Currently there is development in four areas important to this proposed project. They are: VRML, Java, GPS, and Wearable Computers.

Virtual Reality Modeling Language is a text-based "world" description language that is in its 2.x stage of development at this time. There are development environments available for automating the world creation process. One can create terrains and populate them with objects that have behaviors. The VRML worlds can be informed and controlled by links to the Java language. There are a number of plugins for web browsers that make viewing the VRML worlds easy. It might become worthwhile to write a custom browser for this project at a later stage. To my knowledge no one has attempted what I propose to do with VRML.

Java is the object oriented language that is scheduled to run on all computers and displace Microsoft. Neither of these two predictions will probably pan out as expected but the linkability to VRML and use of Java to implement object oriented databases will be enough for my project.
GPS technology has dropped to running shoe prices and allows me to use it on a demonstration level to specify my location in both the real world and the VRML overlay world fairly cheaply. Some simple alt-azimuth input devices would complete the description of "where your are and how your head is pointed" in VRML terrain.

Wearable computers are slowly coming out the geek fashion zone and onto the battlefield and industrial plant grounds. There is activity on the web, detailing the building of relatively inexpensive home brew units with various kinds of personal video displays which could provide simple field demonstration of the finished system.

In my more detailed plans for the project I have scaled the project starting at complete self-funding up to more ambitious versions. Dr. Fox likes this and it makes me less nervous about the proposal's funding needs. The core of the project can be demonstrated without any of the GPS, goggles, or wearable functionality.

This project which I have named LARVAE for Landscape Annotation / Resource Visualization and Assessment Environment could lead to systems having varied uses. An example of one of these would be to use it as a data collection and display backbone for the local national forest. The wearable aspect would allow field scientists to annotate the landscape with data points in the field, saving them in temporary storage in the wearable computer. Back at headquarters, these observations would be incorporated into a periodically updated forest vrml world residing on a digital video disk and carried on subsequent field trips. Meanwhile back at the office the forest world would live on their computer displays and could become something like a conferencing environment that could be entered in unison for discussion and planning. A version of the digitial video disk could be distributed to the public or be made accessible on the web as well.

The project is not about hardware, it is about presenting global visions of natural complexity in real time as simply and elegantly as possible. I am convinced that if I don't do this project, someone else surely will. I would like it to be me at HSU.

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