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IUPUI STUDENTS GIVE PBS VIEWERS PEAK INTO THE FUTURE OF ROBOTS

When a PBS show about robots premiers May 22, millions of viewers across America will see the high-tech 3D 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 3D animation and special effects by two graduate students and an undergraduate student studying in the School of Informatics' New Media program at IUPUI.

Their work represents the largest scale and most comprehensive involvement of the New Media program on a broadcast piece to date, said Dr. Darrell Bailey, Executive Associate Dean of Informatics. "The project fully utilized the tools and technology that we teach our students."

"Living Machines" explores 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 us, serve us, and possibly run society. In Indianapolis, the program will air at 9 p.m. May 22 on WFYI TV 20.

The show about robots on May 22 is the second hour of a two-hour program, with the first hour premiering May 15. The first program looks 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 advisors, 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's of Patterson at the University of Illinois, Donna Cox. 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 everyone of those students is working in the industry."

"Our core mission is to provide extraordinary opportunities for our students and an environment in which they can do their best work," Bailey said. "I am very proud, pleased and thrilled with the quality of work that Jean, Jo, and Andy, with the help of Patterson and Huckleberry have been able to provide."

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 agrees, 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 insite into why things need to be a certain way and how to make decisions with the big picture in mind."

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