jonbritton's blog
I'll be riding in the tenth anniversary ride of AIDS/Lifecycle, a 580-something mile bicycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles raising money for both the victims of HIV and social programs to prevent its further spread. Proceeds benefit the SFAF and the LA LGBT Center/ Please donate what you can, by visiting this link.
I'll be participating in this year's Seismic Challenge, a 200-mile, 2 day ride from San Francisco, through San Jose, around the Bay and up through wine country, traversing 5 major fault lines to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Thousands of individuals benefit from the programs and services of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, locally and globally, and I encourage you to learn more about why this is so important.
Please contribute to their cause here if you're able.
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The first, pre-release version of my portable, interactive simulator will be available soon. The system should work for a 2 - 3 meter dome, and uses open source software to capture user gestures to generate both visual and audio events. Simulations of space and celestial bodies, fractal imagery, and presentation enhancements are all possible in a small, but immersive environment that should support a modest group of viewers.
Check back here for source code, schematics, structural diagrams and video.
The Morrison Planetarium is featured in Wired Magazine, here:
http://www.wired.com/video/planetarium-tech-beyond-the-infinite/1813637559.
It's an interesting video despite the introductory line, "Wired.com goes into the bowels of The California Science Academy to see how it works."
I'll be riding with Lifecycle in June 2010 to raise money for The San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Please show your support for this important cause by donating here. Any amount will help.
I'll be posting an additional page here soon, that'll include realtime GPS maps, camera feeds, landmarking and GIS integration. Wait for it.
The Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences has changed its daily presentation from the (hugely successful, ahem) Fragile Planet, to a show co-produced with the Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History, entitled, Journey to the Stars. It is adapted to contain local, San Francisco imagery and include a live presentation by an astronomer, and I'm credited as Production Engineer.
Fragile Planet will still be shown at the Academy's Nightlife program on Thursday evenings.
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I'll be presenting "The Technology of Science VIsualization at the California Academy of Sciences " at the Astronomy Visualization Workshop, hosted by the California Academy of Sciences. I'll attempt to cover the Morrison fulldome planetarium, the Dolby 3D stereoscopic / 2K theater of the Hearst Forum, the renderfarm and workstation environment of science visualization, and our plans for future experimentation.
Notes and details of our infrastructure and capabilities are available upon request.
I'll be adding information, links, and development with human-computer interaction on a new page and blog, but with a slight twist from the usual blather: a more futurist standpoint, slanted toward the engineering side of data manipulation. Immersive media, stereoscopy, speech-command, crowd immersion and multiple-user input, cybernetics, rapid prototyping, VR, data visualization, etc, are all fair game. I'll likely include code and frameworks of projects I'm involved with offline.
I'm interviewed for my work on and in the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in this month's print issue of Maximum PC Magazine. Norman Chan did an incredible job, even making it sound as though I wasn't completely out of it, despite my disheveled, overcaffeinated inarticulacy and complete lack of preparation (evidenced in the full page, "high times" photo.) No small feat -- great work!
I am currently the Senior Systems Engineer of the Morrison Planetarium and (digital) Exhibits, and credited as Production Engineer (pdf) for the Academy's inaugural presentation, Fragile Planet.
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I'm adding additional content to fill the page vertically, rather than just horizontally, so I may see what it looks like and how to format around it. Ich möchte etwas essen. J'ai faim. That is all, for now, really. These are just words to fill a page.
Also, caffeine is a wonderful thing. Coffee is good. Though it can make one hallucinate if used carelessly. See? Caffeine, stress, and proneness to psychosis-like experiences.
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This is the first post of the new Jonbritton.net Taking up space is what it does, to fill out the page with text so there's something for me to work around when creating themes and templates. This will not always be here. Or maybe it will. Also, there are fonts. Font is an odd word, when taking out of context.