Part 2:
An Idea Takes Shape

Part 3:
IRIDAS and Lennart Nilsson

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IRIDAS Answers the Call

The pair began a frantic search on the Internet for a player but none of the applications they found could manage the 2048 x 768 resolution that their material required. Various CODECs were tried and abandoned because the quality was unacceptable for the demands of critical research visualization, not to mention the problem of artifacts being introduced by the compression process. Finally, they found FrameCycler. 

IRIDAS assured David and Hanna that DDS Bichannel could handle the job and, given their short time line, offered to help them get the system up and running. “We really needed the help,” says David. “FrameCycler itself was very straight forward to operate, but we weren’t sure how to configure the system or what kind of RAID to use. The IRIDAS people were very supportive. They were so responsive it seemed almost too good to be true.”

Lennart Nilsson Joins the Project

Well, fortunately it was true, because with only a few weeks to go before the premiere a whole new task fell into their laps. World-renowned photographer Dr. Lennart Nilsson was doing work photographing stem cell replication in the research facilities of the Karolinska Institute. Dr. Nilsson is famous for a series of groundbreaking photographs of the growing embryo first published in Life Magazine in 1965 (and in his international best-seller A Child is Born). When he heard about the project he asked if it would be possible to do stereoscopic projection of his stem cell images. David and Hanna said “yes” and began the work of selecting material and turning it into a stereoscopic sequence. Did we mention that they were “not stereoscopic people?”

FrameCycler at Lockheed Martin: Journeys to the Sun

Tom Berger, a solar physicist, has used FrameCycler extensively to view assembled frame sequences of the surface of the sun in real time.

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Next: The Right Tool for the Job