Global vision

Circling the big glowing ball that hovers in the middle of the room, you feel like a giant alien casually strolling through the solar system.

Circling the big glowing ball that hovers in the middle of the room, you feel like a giant alien casually strolling through the solar system. You watch the distant Earth, turning slowly as the white puff that is Hurricane Katrina slides into the Gulf of Mexico. Then the sphere morphs into Mars; the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, moves into view from a far horizon. Then it becomes Jupiter, with its swirling atmospheric bands and turbulent red spot.

The display is Science on a Sphere, a pioneering system for presenting planetary portraits gathered from satellites and other spacecraft. Essentially a spherical movie screen of white fibrerglass, 6 ft in diameter, it displays video images from four computer-controlled projectors. Though stationary, it gives the illusion of spinning as the images move, and the nearly invisible wire that holds it up makes it seem to be floating in space. 8216;8216;It8217;s a unique way of showing planetary data sets that makes them come alive,8217;8217; said Michael Starobin, a senior producer for NASA Television working at the space agency8217;s Goddard Space Flight Center. Researchers at the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., developed the system several years ago as an educational tool for students and the public. But the system is becoming increasingly popular among scientists, who see it as a way of quickly conveying the gist of huge amounts of data.

8216;8216;Everyone knew school kids would be impressed, but we8217;ve been surprised by the interest of scientists to get their data on the system,8217;8217; said Alexander E. MacDonald, the NOAA meteorologist who invented Science on a Sphere. 8216;8216;We are visual animals,8217;8217; he went on. 8216;8216;If people visualise data, they tend to understand it, whether you are talking about 600 million years of continental drift or seeing an entire hurricane season projected in three minutes. This is a lot of information, but people get it if they can see it.8217;8217;

Science on a Sphere takes flat, two-dimensional images and data taken from spherical objects like planets and moons, and synchronises and blends them into animated presentations. Most of the almost 100 presentations created so far are silent displays meant to illustrate lectures. Starobin and his group at Goddard are trying to change this approach by producing the first true movie for the system, a 16-minute presentation called Footprints. Data scanned by a passing satellite is sometimes called a footprint.

In less than four months, the group combined remote sensing data and other visuals with graphics, text, computer-generated images, music and narration to depict the dynamic Earth, with guest appearances by the Moon and Mars. 8216;8216;It8217;s a way to depict the natural world in a new way,8217;8217; Starobin said. 8216;8216;Using the sphere gives us another way of seeing things.8217;8217;

Producing this type of programme is not easy, he said, because the sphere distorts things like text and the images of people and common objects. 8216;8216;We had to be creative, but we developed a set of tools that should make it easier the next time,8217;8217; he said.

MacDonald said the installation cost about 180,000, which he called a reasonable investment for a major exhibit at a science centre. He said his group was working on a next-generation system that would display images in higher resolution. It will also add a fifth projector for the bottom of the globe, which hovers about three feet above the floor and is now largely unseen and unused.

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The idea has come a long way since 1995. 8216;8216;I was driving down a road and the thought came to me: Why don8217;t people display things on spheres?8217;8217; said McDonald. 8216;8216;When I got home, I painted a beach ball white and projected pictures on the ball. It looked pretty good, and I thought this would be a great way to explain science to people.8217;8217; WARREN E. LEARY