Three informatics students create 3-D ‘bots’ for PBS segment on ‘living machines’ that premiered this week

By Rich Schneider

Jean Bisesi says the New Media program at IUPUI allows her to do what she never could during 15 years in the advertising and communication business: bring something to life and give it a personality. “You can make it rain, you can make it snow. You are Oz.”

When a PBS show about robots premiered earlier this week, millions of viewers across America saw the three-dimensional special effects work of three students at IUPUI.

In a concluding segment of the hour-long show, Beyond Human: Living Machines,viewers are treated to a live action scene where people and robots pass each other on a downtown street, with the humans taking scant notice of the mechanical marvels in their midst.

There is a policebot, giving directions; a messengerbot, carrying a Tiffany’s box; and personal robots wearing Hawaiian shirts. A window-washer robot scurries past, like a spider, on its way to work.

The people and buildings are real, captured in live action video scenes, but the robots are created with striking 3-D animation and special effects by two graduate students and an undergraduate student studying in the School of Informatics’ New Media program.

Their work represents the largest scale and most comprehensive involvement of the New Media program on a broadcast piece to date, said Darrell Bailey, executive associate dean of the School of Informatics. “The project fully utilized the tools and technology that we teach our students.”

Living Machines explored the brave new world of robotics. New discoveries about the structure and function of the human brain are allowing engineers to design artificial beings that can learn, move and think more like humans. Renowned scientists, ethicists and science fiction writers comment on the possibilities of a landscape populated by artificial people poised to work for humans, serve humans and, possibly, run society.

The show about robots is the second hour of a two-segment program. The first hour premiered May 15 and looked at miniscule machines that may become part of human bodies: robots coursing through the blood stream to battle cancer cells one on one; virtual vision systems projected directly into the cerebral cortex; or computers designed to interface with nervous systems.

The segment showcasing the work of the IUPUI students is short, giving little hint of the tremendous time and effort that went into to the project from graduate students Jean Bisesi and Jo Hewitt, and Andy Hunter, an undergraduate. Beginning last September, they grabbed pencils, sketchpads and books about robotics as they set out to create robots that were functional, unusual, attractive and performed different tasks.

Working under the guidance of two New Media faculty advisers, Don Huckleberry and Bob Patterson, the students proceeded to fulfill the request of Tom Lucas, director of the Beyond Human program: “Do something really unusual, use your imagination and give us something neat to look at.”

Given that he was working with Patterson and Huckleberry, Lucas said, “I figured we couldn’t lose.”

Patterson, who teaches animation and visualization courses in the New Media program and is a computer graphics and virtual reality researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, has worked previously on projects with Lucas as well as others. As technical director for Industrial Light & Magic, he worked on image compositing for Forest Gump and Star Wars Special Edition. He also participated in the Hayden Planetarium “Space Theater” project for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Lucas also enlisted a colleague of Patterson from the University of Illinois, Donna Cox, who served as IU’s first Distinguished Visiting Technologist at University Information Technology Services and was the associate producer for scientific visualization for Cosmic Voyage, the eighth giant-screen IMAX film produced in 1996. The project also provided an opportunity for a University of Illinois student to help create the segment showing humans and robots together.

“Huckleberry, like Patterson, doesn’t stop at anything until it is right,” Lucas said.

Patterson said the Beyond Human: Living Machines program offered the opportunity to match a commercial creative task with students who were ready for it. It was a real-world scenario with a deadline, but with the time the students needed to research, plan, design and experiment with their robotic creations.

Students often face employers who want prospective employees to have experience, Patterson said. “Any student who has ever worked on one of these projects leaves the university with a broadcast quality piece on their reel and every one of those students is working in the industry.”

Hewitt came to the New Media program as a housewife and mother who had squeezed in a biology degree. “I stumbled into this program as a computer illiterate person. It’s been wonderful. This has opened up a whole new world for me.”

Bisesi agreed, saying the New Media program allows her to do what she never could during 15 years in the advertising and communication business: bring something to life and give it a personality. “You can make it rain, you can make it snow. You are Oz.”

“This experience forced me to live up to real-world standards and deadlines,” Hunter said. “It gave me a chance to see what is waiting for me after school, and now I have the opportunity to improve myself in areas that I would not have known that I needed to. Being able to get feedback directly from the producer gave me insight into why things need to be a certain way and how to make decisions with the big picture in mind.”

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