NEI AMNH Thursday Afternoon Breakout: TOOLKITS

Facilitator: R. Wyatt

Scribe/Reporter: J. Stoke

Ryan: Concept of “toolkit” is “everything you might need” to prepare content for delivery.

Carolyn S: CD given out at planetarium show to educator that is designed to deliver basic educational content related to the show. A toolkit for teacher to take home and build on educational experience begun in the dome. Planetarium would train teachers in use of toolkit.

Ken Brandt: What goes in it?

Stoke: “Tools” for our purpose are whatever is needed to effectively create and deliver visualizations.

Joel H. Space-enabled tools that will accept data and output imagery without the need to create a one-off animation, for example, geo-fusion.

Stoke: Showed Content Creator’s Toolkit section from http://hubblesource.stsci.edu as one small model for how NASA can provide useful tools.

Carolyn Sumners: Need tools for NASA visualizers who want to create dome masters but don’t know how to would be very helpful in streamlining the process of creating dome masters.

Is there a web portal for NASA visualizations? No…

Ryan: What formats are used the most? Dome masters? (still/video), Video formats: HD, BetaSP, mini dvcam,

Joel: Important for NASA to make digital files available. Focus not just astronomy/space, but also Earth.

Carolyn: NASA is working on new camera with Panasonic that will replace IMAX on the station, very high resolution.

Small museums need DVD and mpeg 2, not professional videotape formats.

Rachael C: For classroom use: predone flightpaths and footage with a good, simple interface for teachers to use. And wrap some programming around it. Put little programs together.

Maybe a clickable sky map that you can zoom into to see closeup pictures.

Universe at your fingertips already has a good interface to 3^rd graders for example.

Desire to develop curriculum wrapped around visualizations.

Joel: Technology transfer from NASA is needed so that end-users can do it on their own, for example, flight down to a particular city from orbit, not just New York.

Stoke: Possible in some instances, such as Hubble zoom-ins, but not possible as in colliding galaxies that are created from custom code and proprietary data sets.

Carolyn Sumners: manipulation of false color information. Toolkit that involves public domain plugins to inexpensive image manipulation programs (such as NIH Image) for building and playing with information. Ability to play with co-registered images and apply color filters.

Mark Petersen: Explain to NASA what a dome master is. Web portal that shows where the fulldome clips are.

Joel: Videolan.org has a client called vlc that will playback HD mpeg 2 files. On science side, can’t always get high res copy by using normal inquiry protocol. Need to ask for “original frames.”

John: We’re happy to provide full frames to anyone, but don’t for dome originals because (1) there is a small number of users (and it’s helpful for us to know who they are), and (2) we don’t want general public downloading them and eating up bandwidth.

Want raw frames with alpha channel. Zip them up.

What 3D Animation packages are used?
Maya

3DS Max

Lightwave

Geofusion

People want ‘wireframes’ but many animations / visualizations are not created that way.

How about DVD authoring templates geared to educator?

Ken B: Who can teach me about DVD creation and formats?

General: There are a lot of people who have learned these techniques. They need to share know-how.

Carolyn S: If you create a finished program, also provide the raw elements (image frames, unmixed audio tracks, etc.) to enable best customization of programs.

Joel: NASA puts emphasis on helping the underserved. One recommendation could be a way to marry graduate students and planetarium programs so that expertise is coming through interns funded by NASA.

NASA central hub/portal that points to NASA resources, including those from NASA funded missions that are not headquartered at NASA centers.

Need visualizations driven by educational needs, not research. Standards based.

But NASA perhaps not best place to go for this. Nobody at NASA doing basic night sky astronomy.

What about powerpoints that Anita provided? Useful but need to be adapted.

Joel: Public affairs representatives should be at these meetings.

Imaginova is developing a standards-based educational product based on the Starry Night engine.

Joel: Need to develop ‘toolkits’ linked to missions and celestial events roadmap.

End users want more access to scientists and NASA Public Affairs often gets in the way.