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Visualization Lab

The world is facing major global challenges. We are now testing if and in that case how visualization can accelerate learning and increase people’s knowledge for a sustainable world.

The world’s first public visualization lab

We are creating a visualization lab in close collaboration with Visualization Center C and with support from the Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture. People will have access to research data using the very latest visualization technology.

The lab will open in January 2022. Together we are breaking new ground, treading new paths along the road towards increased knowledge and enhanced innovation in the fields of science, technology and mathematics.

We are living in an amazing age with technology being developed at breakneck speed. At the same time, we are surrounded by really big challenges. A virus, invisible to the naked eye, can disrupt an entire world in an instant. An increase of just a degree or so in the Earth’s average temperature can affect entire ecosystems. And millions of light years away are answers to questions about life on Earth.

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The visualization lab will give children and adults the opportunity to create their own expeditions into the data, like a research explorer in search of questions and answers about, for example, space, the climate or urban development. It is a place where you can share other people’s knowledge and experiences while creating your own.

Acting sustainably and making good decisions requires knowledge and experience. And many times courage. In the public visualization lab, we will show that anyone at all can embrace and enact science.

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The learning environment is based on five different themes: oceans and water, forest and land, society, mankind and space. Based on these themes, the visitor can move between the small and the big, acquiring an insight into how everything is interconnected. In the visualization lab, we will show that anyone at all can embrace and enact science. We can meet and unite through the images.

Communicating science with visualization

Our human senses are amazing, but limited. Learning about science and technology, which often deals with the “invisible”, can be a major challenge. Our experiences and perception are limited to the world to which we have direct access through our senses. But it is outside this realm, in the microcosm and macrocosm or in abstract big data with numerous dimensions, where many scientific theories are to be found.

So how can we understand Neptune’s moons, traffic flows, carbon dioxide levels in the air, neural networks, climate impact, evolutionary processes and migratory flows – everything that is too small, too big, too slow, too fast, too complex, or too abstract for our minds to register?

The rapid development of hardware and software combined with growing volumes of open data means that the same methods and data used by researchers can be used to communicate scientific discoveries. Professor Anders Ynnerman at Visualization Center C calls it exploranation (a combination of the words explore and explain). This convergence of exploratory and explanatory visualizations represents a paradigm shift in the communication of science.

Images are the fastest way of creating high bandwidth between people and data. The visual language crosses boundaries of knowledge, experience, age, gender and culture, and the algorithms and functions of visualization technology enable big, incomprehensible data to be transformed into images that become easy for everyone to analyse and understand. This makes visualization the most effective way to communicate science.

Developing the unexplored

As of February 2020, we are conducting tests to make scientific data available based on the concept of exploranation. This station uses OpenSpace – open, non-commercial software – for interactive data visualization of the entire known and scientifically measured universe, developed by Visualization Center C together with NASA, among others. You cannot get any closer to a space trip than this without actually going there.

The station will be the actual start of exploration by Universeum and Visualization Center C into how visualisation can accelerate learning and enhance people’s knowledge. With the visualization lab at Universeum and a sister lab at Visualization Center C in Norrköping, the conditions are being created for long-term collaboration, joint development, synergies and exchanges.

Together we will:

increase interest in education in the areas of science and technology through links to broad fields of science.
enhance teaching competence and increase the achievement of goals throughout the entire the education chain.
contribute to popular education, for example by increasing understanding of new technologies and reducing digital exclusion.
create good conditions for innovation and sustainable social development.

The visualization lab’s environments and programmes are being developed by Universeum and Visualization Center C through a steering group and a workgroup with unique competences from both parties in the areas of system development, teaching, interaction design, experience design and technology. This initiative is being supported by the Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture.

The visualization lab is part of Universeum’s major investment in digitalisation and is part of our development programme with sights set on a next generation science centre in 2022.