Indiana University brings ancient cities back to lifeBloomington 22 August 2001 Chichen Itza, Uxmal and other critically important and threatened archaeological sites in the world will come back to "life" in virtual reality thanks to Indiana University researchers in Indianapolis and Bloomington and IBM High Performance Storage System (HPSS) technology that is deployed over a wide area network.
The digital preservation project will collect data using state-of-the-art
digital techniques to archive and develop virtual reality replicas of the sites
as they exist today. It also will create scalable multimedia applications to
recreate the history, sights and sounds of the cultural locations as they were
in ancient times.
Using the Internet or the faster Internet2 or Next Generation Internet
communications technology will enable scientists, students and anyone interested
in early cultures to "walk" through the IU digital recreations. Visitors will be
engaged in seeing, hearing and experiencing firsthand how people lived thousands
of years ago.
IU's Cultural Digital Library Indexing Our Heritage (CLIOH) project is one of
several using IBM HPSS technology to compile, access and transmit vast amounts
of data among researchers hundreds of times faster. The CLIOH project is an
initiative of the IU School of Informatics. CLIOH will additionally draw upon
the visualization resources of the IUPUI New Media Program and the extensive
faculty expertise in interactive media at IUPUI.
With IBM's HPSS technology, researchers can collaborate from across the street
or across the continent to create virtual digital libraries with almost
instantaneous access to scientific data, experimental findings, books or
illustrations. In much the same way as the world's fastest supercomputers
process data in parallel, to perform hundreds of billions of calculations per
second, the IBM open, distributed HPSS file storage system at IU is a data
superhighway that retrieves information simultaneously in parallel over a wide
area network. Transfer rates for the huge files can be as high as gigabytes per
second. With HPSS, files that normally might take hours to transfer can be
downloaded in mere minutes.
At IU, the HPSS system will foster greater collaboration between researchers,
faculty and students at the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses with instant
access up to the 200 terabyte capacity.
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