An Open Mind, 095

For instance, once I was managing a team of American geophysicists working in Zhou Xian, now Zhou Zhuo, Heibi Province, about 40 km south of Beijing. I would go over and work with them for a few weeks at a time on the project. One of the geophysicists, Gary Jones, is an excellent musician. We got talking about topography and spatial frequencies, and the potential impact on musical composition. Then we got thinking about some of the seismic sections we had been interpreting, and realized that these same type of topographic spatial frequencies for the subsurface are recorded on seismic sections. We took sections across some alluvial fans we had been interpreting, and created ‘Three Fans in G^m.’ It was a lot of fun, and is one of those ideas which would be fun to pursue at some time in the future. It seems logical to me that better understanding of the sources of inspiration for creative compositions can help to bridge the science-religion matrix.

A related example occurred in 1989, when I held a two hour teleconference^2.78 with about 25 participants at about 14 locations from California to Vermont, and from Houston to Chicago. Each site had a Lynk box, which sat between the telephone and a slide projector. Four of the participants took turns giving our portion of the presentation by taking control of sending the signal to automatically advance the slides at each of the other sites via a carrier signal and the Lynk box. It was a very interesting experiment, especially for December of 1989. The biggest surprise that came out of the teleconference was the unanticipated collaboration among participants. Bowen Loftin, who at the time was a University of Houston professor doing a lot of work for NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC), was ill, dressed in his pajamas at his ranch in Navasota, Texas. Jean Jacques Grimaud, president of the first company making virtual reality gloves and head-mounted displays, was in his office in San Francisco, California. During one of the question and answer periods, Dr. Loftin made arrangements for JSC to purchase its first head mounted display device.

Over the following decade I did a lot of work and projects with Dr. Loftin and his team. Some other colleagues and myself ended up forming a company, Walden Visualization Systems,^2.79 which was later merged with a geophysical contracting company named Energy Innovations to form Continuum Resources International Corporation. We pioneered using immersive environments to visualize geotechnical data. By storing gigabyte 3-D seismic surveys at different sites, and only sending state changes between sites with standard DSL lines, we were able to simultaneously collaborate between our offices in Houston, Texas, in London, England, and in Perth, Australia. Figure 33 shows the MuSe crafts which allowed multiple people at different locations to be in the same space and to interactively interact with each other.

timedex

infinite grid

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