The Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois was recently invited to present its recent film “Solar Superstorms” at the 2016 SIGGRAPH Conference.
This conference will be the 43rd annual international conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques, and will take place July 24-28 in Anaheim, California.
NCSA’s AVL team was accepted to share the film in multiple venues of the conference. The first will be “Science of the Unseen: Digital Art Perspective,” organized by the Digital Art Community, which is an online exhibition that will be displayed in a social gathering venue at the conference called, “The SIGGRAPH Village.” The SIGGRAPH online exhibition will allow the chosen scenes to stay online for several years with ongoing publicity. This work will be seen not only by the art community, but also by the computer scientists and researchers who are at the forefront of developing new tools and presentation methods.
The other venue will be the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Electronic Theater, a special two-hour show that contains the best computer graphics short films of the year. The selections to be shown in the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater are chosen by an internationally recognized jury that receives hundreds of submissions and chooses only a few to represent the best work of the year.
“Solar Superstorms” takes viewers on a turbulent journey through space, showing cutting-edge visualizations of the inner workings of the sun – some of which were computed on Blue Waters. The 24-minute film, narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, teaches about solar activity, and how superstorms that occur on the sun have impacted Earth in the past and what threat they may pose to us in the future.
The AVL team at NCSA creates scientific content for film, using large amounts of data. The team strives to bring together art, science and technology. For more information, visit http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/.