 John Brose, the coordinator of the visualization studio was supposed to be here today, but he had a last minute family emergency. So I'm going to do my best to represent John and what he wanted to communicate with you. But at the end, I do have his communication, his email and his phone, and he's really hoping that people will contact him with questions. So if I can't answer, please contact John. He's really accessible and a nice guy. He's just so excited about our Viz Studio that he's really happy to share information. Okay. So let's get started. I've got quite a few slides here. So my name is Shauna Sadler. I am the AUL for the Digital Library and Research Technologies at the University of Calgary. Just a quick outline for you today. This was our game plan. I'm going to speak more to the administrative side. I was part of the design and planning and construction and somewhat of the operationalization. And John is hired to run the visualization studio. So he was going to speak to his experiences over the past year and a half of running the space. So just a quick context. This is our new library building. It is entirely new construction. It's called the Taylor Family Digital Library. The vision for this library building is this first line right here, State of the Art and Learning and Research Center. And Tom Pickerson, our university librarian, gave us a high standard to meet. So we should imagine right now. Something that we wanted to do was not just support research, but actually have the library building be a research tool in itself. Some of the broad themes of this library building that we wanted to be agile. So it can remain contemporary, inspiring and innovative for everyone who comes in. So now I'm going to shift to the visualization studio itself. So for this space, Tom here, wanted one space dedicated to faculty and graduate students to conduct research. The majority of the building is designed for undergraduate students, but we wanted to reserve one space dedicated to those professional level research activities. The mandate of this room, and that first line is the most important, is that it is to be a meaningful space that provides technologies and services to enhance the research effort. And by that we really mean to keep in contact with the researchers, what is important to them, what they find valuable, and for us to be agile and to be responsive. So the strategy for designing this room was to engage faculty and grad students, talk to them, work with them. And so I do have from my background in Calgary a broad range of contacts, and so I did approach them with their original idea which we put forward as a 3D cave. And there was a passionate response not to do a cave. But it got the ball rolling and it got me committed to being an active group to design the new space, which was wonderful. Now of this group there was a subgroup that came to me specifically, Dr. Sheila Carfindale in Computer Science, and she said that she had a fantastic group of post-docs and graduate students who were bright and eager to contribute, and they wanted to do a design and propose it to the committee. And so the committee came up with some requirements for these researchers for the broad themes of what they wanted in this space dedicated to research. First they wanted it for collaborative discovery. They're finding a lot of their spaces in their departments are small, small meeting rooms that aren't, everyone brings their laptops and they're kind of looking over each other's shoulders and it's hard to be collaborative. So they wanted a bigger space where they could all see the same screen at the same time and work together on some new ideas. And then features that you can't do on your desktop. So big images. If you've got big data, how do you see the whole picture when your desktop marker is so small? It just kept coming back to the amount of space, digital space that was really important. There's also the quality of that space. The high resolution is incredibly significant to them. They're investing in incredible instruments to capture high resolution data. They need to analyze it properly. They need high resolution screens and lots of them to do so. But they wanted this experience to be easy. They wanted it to be just like working on their desktop computer but better. So one of the problems with the cave is that you had to program for that specific environment. And it was too much effort. They needed it to be faster and a really easy custom local environment. They wanted to make sure we future proof the room. Dedicated staff to support the room. Our sociologist was very specific. She said no bezels to interrupt the image. And that was a controversial item within the group. Making sure that we respect research data and the ethical use of using the data in the room because there are lots of requirements for that. And to keep the policies to a minimum. So let us do what we want to do. Actually I quickly, I did a quick translation of a few of them. What they really meant by some of those statements. And they wanted lots of movable furniture, electrical plugs, wireless infrastructure and the virtual collaboration opportunities. And that was still an unknown at the time. And I'll tell you today it's still what tool we use is different by department. We talked about the desktop feature proof the room. What they were really talking about was the operating budget. They wanted to make sure that the library was committed to making sure this room was a long-term investment, not a short-term. And they'd seen that on campus before. The dedicated staff, they have again those unfortunate experiences of not having enough support. So that was extremely important to them. We'll talk about the interrupted images in a bit. The research data. What they really talked about was being respectful of the research data. What if they didn't want any windows? They wanted a secure door. So a lockable door. And then a secure virtual environment as well. And so we did build those features into the room and those have been valued. And the last one. It was a light-hearted comment, but it's actually turned out to be incredibly important. Leave us alone. Don't over-police us. We want to do what we want to do. And in the library they were very specific that they wanted to bring food and alcohol to host proper faculty events in the space. If you want faculty to come to the library, you have to serve alcohol. And that's just a reality. And they made that very clear from the beginning. So Sheila and her grad students went away with these requirements in hand. And they came back with a few drawings for us. So here's a few models. So here's a few features that are important. There's a high-resolution wall. You've got some touch screens on pivots. Touch table, an oversized HD touch table. And then a couch with a smaller touch table for brainstorming. So here are the features here. The high-resolution wall, they wanted it to be a touch or a gestured environment just so that people could experience having that experience of manipulating their data. And touch was great, but once we started understanding the height and width of the wall, we understood that would be a really athletic endeavor, moving something from one end to the other and providing stepped stools. It was maybe not the research experience they wanted. And so we decided that maybe we should go with more of a gesture, right? We always explained that the Tom Cruise Minority Report, how he manipulates things with just his hand. So that's becoming a reality. It's expensive reality, but we're getting there. Configurable displays because they want the room set up the way they want it. They don't force us within the barriers. The large table in the center is supposed to be like a console, like a control center, you know, in Star Trek. So you can move images between multi-surfaces. And that was something that came up in this process, was multi-surface computing was extremely important and valued because everybody had lots of digital data and they wanted lots of surfaces to display it simultaneously. Then they liked the idea of lots of brainstorming touch tables and that sofa was really important to them. So here we go. We talked about the quantity of data and the quality of that data was incredibly important. So here's a few of the suggested configurations for that space. So what they liked talking about was if you were one person in the room how you could use the control table and have lots of screen space for your work. And maybe you've got a collaborative environment here. And again, lots of space for you to work with. Or if you wanted to break up the room and have different spaces for people to work, you could do that as well. So what they did is a few use case scenarios that they brainstormed. This one here is my favorite because this is what they proposed their ideal library catalog search to look like. So here they are. This is what they want the library catalog interface to look like. And then they wanted to have multi-surfaces so they could find interesting articles they like and just throw it up to a screen so they can look at that principle as they're working through. And here's one that they projected for someone in physics who's captured data about the sun. So they've been able to take that data, put it up on the high-res screen and really analyze the depth of it. A sample of it here to do the analysis. Some of your data and some extra subsets. Somebody in geography and geology. We have a lot of that in Calgary. So here you get charts, your photographs, topographical maps some other sorts of data maps and your other data on the side. In a collaborative environment you see everybody around the table pointing a different screen to manipulating the data that's all configured to work together. I really like this one. It's a poster session. And it's a touch screen poster session so these are interactive posters rather than passive posters. Wouldn't that be nice? And here's one for central administration. So if the president is giving a very special presentation to an important donor or an important industry partner bring them to an impressive space and put their presentation on a really special wall. And last was they wanted to show something. This is a data visualization of sound. And so they wanted to show what the continuous screen where that would be really valuable. So you can manipulate the data here and then see what that looks like across the whole spectrum of the audio content. So this is what the visualization studio looked like on opening day. That's a dark projection. Sorry about that. So we do have the big high resolution wall and we do have the big touch table, high depth touch table. But we had to compromise the panels, the touch screens on the side in order to afford not having the bezels in the screen. That was bigger investment than we had hoped but we decided that it was important and maybe we could do a phase two of adding the touch screens to the side of the wall. So this is where John would have taken over. He'll explain a few things so I'll do the best I can. So you see that we do have a tremendous amount of pixels in this space. 34.5 million pixels is just, it's a spectacular experience. So to compare this to others, what John did is he put together you know, this is what your desktop, this red line here, your display pixels are. The SLR camera from Canon is the blue line. This is where this studio is. And it is at the research level. There's a quality environment so that researchers can properly conduct their research with confidence. So we've created this by 15 projectors from Christie Digital. I'll give you the specs in a little bit. What's nice is that they also do brightness and color balancing and that's really important if you want to have a consistent image so you can do proper analysis. And we do have some bezels but they are one millimeter or less and this is what it looks like here. So when you're standing and looking directly at the vis wall you do see a little bit of the line here and the black and white is the most prominent. When you look at the, you're up really close and you're looking down the wall. That's what this image is here. And so this is what our quantitative data researcher in sociology, this is what she was concerned about. She does a lot of data analysis and this is what she wanted, was to be able to see her data continuously. If she had a bezel in the middle it would break her analysis and she said that would make for, well the environment would not work for her. And so she has done quite a lot of work in this space and she has been happy. We do have 7.1 surround sound. We do want to support multimedia work in this room and we do have a 55 inch touch table. It's a high-jeft touch table and multi-touch from smart technologies. They have a custom solution department. I acquired it from them. So here are the technical specifications. This presentation will be available so you can refer to it later. So once we had the room built then we had to hire somebody to run it and I engaged with the committee again, the faculty committee one more time because they were very specific on some of their requirements for that person. So this is what they came to me with. Their requirements for that person. So when I wrote the job description I've given you some of the highlights of his job description. And so we hired John who's supposed to be here right now and I really wish he was, but he's not and that's okay. So John does have a PhD in computer science and his background is in data visualization and 3D graphics. What I've heard back, the feedback I've had from the faculty members is that they value John because he does have a PhD. He's conducted research himself and he is published. He is one of them and they feel comfortable and they have confidence in John for that reason. So if I were to write that job description again today I would probably write PhD. That is published. That has been one of the most valuable assets that John has brought. It's just that confidence. I think second is that he does have a background in computer science. So even people who in the engineering or the hard scientists they appreciate that background and they have confidence that he is capable of solving or working with them on their problems or their research. And again that has been incredibly valuable. On the softer side John's personality is suited really well to service. He is approachable. He is accessible. He uses accessible language which is really important because there's a lot of tech talk that can happen and a lot of intimidation. He doesn't do that. He genuinely wants people to be successful in the room and that comes across and the researchers have come back to me and they have appreciated his very kind and genuine approach to their research. So I'll show you a few use cases of work that's happened in the room. So here's Sheila and Uta, the part of the group who designed the room. Uta is now graduate of Uta Henryx. She created something called Fat Fonts and so it's a design of a font that as the quantitative gets higher the thicker the font style. So it's a visual and so here's an actual map that they use with this. And it's hard to see on your desktop computer but when you stand back in a big room it gives greater impact to the work. And here we have Dr. Frank Maurer who was on our committee as well. They show up better on the website on the PowerPoint on the online. He has some of his grad students here presenting to industry partners and you can see he's got several different data sets up on the wall and so when you're presenting to somebody in this room it's really nice. You're not flipping back and forth from data you can just shift to different areas of the room. And that's been really valuable. So here we have a faculty member in psychology and he hosted a workshop for some of his graduate students with students in the room and he's teaching different MRI scanning and visualization techniques. So again the quality of the image was incredibly important because they're looking at MRI scans as they go in and look at what's happening in different images and again the analysis is alongside of the images so it makes for a more powerful experience. Now this is one we did not predict at all but a faculty member in the drama department came and used the room as a performance experience and so he used the big screen as the backdrop, theatrical backdrop and he did a performance about schizophrenia and the experience of schizophrenia and so the surround sound was a really important feature of that room and so it's a smaller room and so it was a really intimate setting and he made the lights quite dark and the people who experienced his performance said they really had a strong impact of what it was like to have schizophrenia because the surround sound he had voices coming from different angles and there was lots of images around and then his voice was describing what was happening and we didn't expect to have that at all and that's a wonderful way that this room has been used. So here's Frank Mallor and some of his other students they use multiple types of hardware it's hard to see this but they're actually presenting this for the media which is great right, that's what we want to do is help our faculty get noticed. There's actually a cameraman just over here a sound engineer behind there and the image, the quality of the wall is wonderful and it photographs really well so when the newspaper photographers come the researcher stands in front with the big image of their research behind them it's fantastic, it's very powerful and it also films really well so we've had lots of media come in and interview our faculty in this space and it has a thesis defense from our environmental design and this one student she was looking at an analysis of Calgary and what she wanted to do was talk about some comparative timeline and I forget what her topic was exactly but again she held her defense in the Viz Studio because she could put all of her data up at the same time and so her committee really appreciated that they didn't have to flip back and forth but what are you saying, why is this different at house especially, it was all right there in front of them our faculty of nursing had to ensure the government the provincial government that they were teaching appropriate curriculum and so what they had to do was show the curriculum structure of the nursing and they had the government officials in the room and so again big space, this is how it all happens this is the big view and this is how it works was a lot easier for them to communicate their curriculum, their broad curriculum instead of in again a power point and small space faculty who like to do an image analysis, lots of pictures, grouping them and stuff, that was quite a hot topic in our area so this one is really interesting again dark in our profession cultural institutions we know a lot of the institutions are doing high-resolution scans of important works so with this one it's a high-resolution scan of a painting and our faculty member studies this artist quite regularly and so he took this high-resolution scan and brought it to the visualization studio and put it up on the big wall and because of the quality of the image he was able to see the brushstrokes the cracks in the painting and then they've been in different arguments and he was able to contribute new ideas new thoughts to the literature in his area on this, similar to one of our biggest successes in the room especially everyone who's interested in digital humanities this is Dr. Murray McGillbury in our department of English and what he did was he got this scan of a medieval manuscript from the British Library and what he wanted to do was use Photoshop because you can see the writing is quite hard to read and he wanted to have a grader he wanted to make the font pop as much as possible and what he would do is he would on his computer he would zoom in edit and then have to zoom out to see if that was appropriate or not and he just got tired he was exhausted of zooming in and zooming out all the time so he came into the room and we loaded Photoshop for him and he was able to do that on the big screen what happened was one of his PhD students was doing some of this work because he had to do it for every page and she noticed something what they found that there are these etchings on the side is that actual handprint that's been drawn in the marginalia and no one has ever seen that before and so then they went back through the entire book looking for them and they're these hands with different types of sleeves and they're pointing in different ways and different fingers in the hand pointing and so this is a really exciting discovery that was made in Calgary of a medieval manuscript from England and it was our visualization studio that enabled that so Johnson a great job of tracking which departments have been using the visualization studio and as you can see it's actually the arts so it's mostly been the humanities and the fine arts who've been using it science is doing pretty well what we're finding is that business likes to bring in industry partners to have exciting presentations in that space education tends to gather a lot of data so the size of the wall has been really important to them and the IT facilities has actually used the space quite a lot just for their own administration of the university again because they have so much data and a lot of maps to look at and looking at that space is very helpful some of the software that's been requested to use in the room that's a lot of data so we did have a reality with the hardware the PC running the wall the first one we got which was selected by the faculty committee was really good at running real-time communications it was a control center PC but what it wasn't so good at doing was rendering 3D models and it turned out our faculty were incredibly active in that area more than we had expected but at the time we couldn't find any PC that would run those 3D models and the video card to display across all those projectors so a year and a half later such a PC existed and we did purchase it which actually proved to the committee that our operating budget was committed to the success of the room they started to become more active because we were responding to their needs we can now support the 3D model and the work thereof in the room so some characteristics of the room that the faculty have communicated back to us that I thought you would find interesting and important first of all there's a lot of politics on campus and there are wealthy departments and lots of wealthy departments and when they try to meet who gets to meet where and it's turned out that the library and this faculty dedicated space is a neutral place on campus and that removes the first hurdle to the success of that work so that's a wonderful experience they have found that it is a collaborative workspace they're encouraging us to do more with it especially around the furniture they have appreciated the windows and that we are respectful of sensitive data and so people are bringing more sensitive data into the room to do more aggressive research the high resolution has been valued the large real estate was a good decision and that the PR department is happy that it looks so good in the pictures and in films by the media again the flexible furniture and that we have had and that we have been open to new uses of the space one day it's a theater next day it's an industry partner meeting room we do have a movable bar we do allow catering in the space much to the chagrin of my finance and again so quickly just about the policies of the room so we have kept it to a minimum we do allow the food and drink it is restricted to researchers the graduate students the faculty no undergrads so as you remove the undergrads the faculty will come everyone reports that over and over again we did have one researcher want to book the room for two months but we do it's a seven day consecutive maximum and for 90% of the people that's been fine most bookings are an afternoon or a morning some have been about three or four days but we haven't had anyone do a full seven day booking yet and then you can access the room when that floor it's on the fourth floor of our library and when that floor is open you can access the room no problem so most days that's 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. and that seems to work for everybody so far we do have a card access lock on the door and so John communicates who will have access to this room at your booking they give the card numbers and John programs the card and so that way we can ensure that it is a secure space so quickly John has done an evaluation of the usage so over time we do a lot of bookings but we sure do a lot of tours of the space well and so he has separated the two out and what we're happy to see is that the bookings have increased over time and that's the blue dotted line here and the red is the tours so our tours remain consistent we're still doing a lot of them but we are getting greater usage and we're also getting a lot of repeat customers and that's a wonderful experience and we're also seeing an increase of the use percentage of the weekdays and we weren't sure if we needed to staff evenings and weekends but so far it really is office hours that's being used so quickly some lessons learned mostly about staffing the space which is the question I get most often about the room one yes it is going to be a higher John we would now recommend the PhD with the research experience that has been a valuable asset second John needs a second set of hands because once in a while he takes vacation not often but sometimes and so Jed RIT AED specialist has been helping John run the room and that has been a really valuable experience marketing promotion event planning this room does get requests to the lodge and it is wonderful to help researchers know or remind researchers that it exists because sometimes they forget and they tell us that oh yeah I forgot about that place that'd be really handy and so having somebody to do promotions and event planning is really important to the success of the room and then also just somebody who's out there who's in contact with the researchers on a regular basis to say oh I think we can help you with that or what are your needs and just to have that dialogue with them quickly lessons learned we didn't give it enough real estate good size wall the amount of people it can hold has been too small for many of the occasions even for the media events I think if we could do it again we might even build two or have one big space with a move of a wall we have had a lot of faculty who want to hold graduate seminars in this space and a lot of workshops and just a different kind of environment to support what they want to teach and do with their graduate students and we need to hold more people I would say also quickly in addition to that is I would probably move the room so it's closer to the entry exit of the building it's easier to access I think it's on the fourth floor which has been a detriment to the usage of the room funny enough John has said the faculty members who were active on the committee have been very clear that when we did the purchasing of the equipment we invited the vendors required the vendors to set up one beside the other and demonstrate their products beside each other so that we can compare the quality of them and they've all come back and said that was a really valuable experience and that if we were to build another room we should do that exact same exercise now it's hard because it's expensive for the vendors to fly their equipment in but it's a big ticket item to make sure it was proper so I'm really glad we did that and we've had valuable feedback so I just want to say thank you very much and especially if you have technical questions or usage questions here's John and his contact information he's wonderful and he's really excited to hear your questions thank you very much