'Cosmic Voyager' Donna Cox is IU's first DVT

'Making the invisible visible'

By Jayne Spencer

A master of "scientific visualization" has been named Indiana University's first Distinguished Visiting Technologist at University Information Technology Services (UITS).

Donna J. Cox served as associate producer for scientific visualization for Cosmic Voyage, the eighth giant-screen IMAX film produced in 1996.

The film led viewers into "a cosmic zoom" that extended from the surface of the Earth to the largest observable structures in the universe, and then back down into a microscopic territory -- with "flight" through a carbon atom and views of quarks, the smallest known building blocks of matter.

The announcement of the appointment was made last week by Michael McRobbie, IU vice president for information technology.

Cox is regarded as one of the pioneers of the "second wave" in computer graphic art and is credited with setting current standards for scientific visualization.

Cox will help build collaborations at IU among researchers in information technologies, faculty and staff who work in the visual and fine arts, and related areas such as computer graphics, visualization, virtual reality and tele-immersion.

She will also develop collaborations between these areas at IU and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's (UIUC) National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where she is assistant director of the Virtual Director Team for the National Technology Grid Group. She is also professor and director of the Center for Graphic Technologies at UIUC's School of Art and Design.

Cox, whose formal training is in the visual arts, has exhibited computer images and animations in more than 100 invitational exhibits and has written numerous papers on computer graphics, information design and scientific visualization.

These include the ground-breaking article, "Using the Supercomputer to Visualize Higher Dimensions: An Artist's Contribution to Scientific Visualization," published in Leonardo, an international journal of art, technology and science. In this article, she developed the concept of "Renaissance Teams."

A Renaissance Team, she said, is not "art or science by committee," but a process that can "provide a critical mass of knowledge which can effectively address concepts, aesthetics and technological advances."

Cox put her Renaissance Team theory to the test when she assembled top rated film makers, scientists, astronomers, physicists, biologists and computer animation experts to create the Academy Award-nominated Cosmic Voyage. She used computer-generated imagery, 3-D modeling techniques and various other production tools to emphasize the magnitude of the universe. The film's computer animation sequences demonstrate the power of computer technologies in making complex scientific information comprehensible. This melding of art and science to make the invisible visible Cox calls "edutainment."

Cox's work is also serving to revolutionize the way Hollywood makes movies. Working with colleagues from NCSA, Cox developed "Virtual Director," a "virtual reality choreographer" that allows animators to be completely immersed in their scene as never before. This process, which Cox describes as "stepping inside the computer," provides them with new levels of creativity and control.

Her work has been exhibited in more than 100 invitational and juried art shows over the past decade and has been seen on numerous television programs, including Nova.

In addition, the PBS television special Infinite Voyage: Unseen Worlds featured her as a pioneering artist in scientific visualization, as has the Disney Channel's Discover series. She has appeared on numerous other television programs, including Good Morning America and The New Explorers, and her work also has been featured in Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal.