Coffee & Viz features Negro League baseball in VR, Webb telescope pics, and bear bellies

The best in visualization returns to the Libraries this spring in our Coffee & Viz series. The engrossing series in the Hunt Library’s Teaching and Visualization Studio showcases the unique ways that researchers at NC State and elsewhere are using visualization to enhance their scholarly work.

Coffee & Viz events are free and open to the public; registration is required. For the morning events in this series, complimentary coffee, tea, and light refreshments from local business Anisette will be available beginning at 9:15 a.m. in an adjacent space—to help increase the sustainability of this program, please bring your own coffee mug.

To watch videos of past Coffee & Viz events, visit the Libraries’ Think and View. To receive email updates about Libraries’ events, subscribe.

The spring 2023 Coffee & Viz schedule is as follows:

Measuring the roundest bear for Fat Bear Week: Innovative use of scanning technology in Alaska’s National Parks
Friday, Jan. 27, 1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m.; online
Join us online for a presentation and Q&A with Joel Cusick (GIS specialist with Alaska Regional Office, NPS), who will show how the National Park Service is using scanning technology to provide quantitative metrics for Fat Bear Week, a fun and educational online voting event each October that combines the fun of a March Madness-style popularity tournament with education about the Katmai National Park and Preserve’s ecosystem and the brown bears that are an integral part of it. Come see how a Terrestrial Laser Scanner can be put to work measuring the roundest bear belly.

Worldbuilding and recovery: Revisiting historical moments with VR
Friday, March 24, 9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m., Teaching & Visualization Lab
Interactive and immersive experiences can build empathy and deepen understanding of historical contexts. In this talk, Dr. Derek Ham will present the inspirations and processes behind his work in Virtual Reality that reexamines and reclaims moments in Black and Civil Rights history. Building upon the critical acclaim of his I Am A Man (2017) project, Ham developed and released Barnstormers: Determined to Win (2021) in collaboration with the Negro League Baseball Museum and with support from Epic Games and Reallusion. This immersive historical fiction allows players to step into the shoes of iconic figures like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige and experience the joys, triumphs, and challenges of Black baseball players during segregation. The project was recognized at the Cannes XR Festival in March 2022. Ham’s talk is in conjunction with the Black Research Symposium at NC State.

Exploring galactic origins through the Webb Space Telescope
Friday, April 21, 9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m., Teaching & Visualization Lab
The images coming back to Earth from the James Webb Space Telescope have captivated the world, showcasing our universe in breathtaking detail. The largest optical telescope in space, the Webb telescope was launched on Christmas Day, 2021. Dr. Rongmon Bordoloi, assistant professor of physics in the NC State College of Sciences, studies the origins and evolution of galaxies as part of a Webb telescope post-launch program. In this talk he will tell us how scientists are using the Webb to explore and expand our understanding of the cosmos.