Visualization Lab provides data in three dimensions

On the second floor of the Peabody Museum, in a darkened room painted flat black, Harvard geologist John Shaw slips on a pair of futuristic goggles as he sits before a 23-foot-wide wrap-around screen.

With a click of his mouse, a rotating yellow outline of Africa seems to jump off the screen and fill the small room. Globular columns of red magma lurking deep below most of the floating image slither in three dimensions up to volcanoes on the surface.

The southern tip of Africa appears to pass within easy arm's reach as the 3-D representation slowly whirls in midair.

"It would be very hard to represent this in any kind of two-dimensional display," says Shaw, Harry C. Dudley Professor of Structural and Economic Geology. "You end up having to show people 13 or 15 slices and try to let their brain do the work of composing this 3-D architecture."

Despite what early explorers feared, the Earth is not flat. And that has long presented a challenge for geologists trying to model and study three-dimensional sections of the Earth's crust on flat maps and computer screens.

The data used by Harvard's Structural Geology and Earth Resources Group are no longer imprisoned in two dimensions, thanks to a new state-of-the-art immersive Visualization Lab, the first of its kind at Harvard and one of few in the world. Racks of powerful computers and graphics processors feed stereo images compiled from scientific data to three digital projectors suspended from the ceiling.

The stereo image looks blurry until you slip on the high-tech goggles, which, in a feat of precision timing, block one eye then the other in time with alternating left and right perspectives projected onto the 8-foot-tall screen. The result is a breathtakingly realistic 3-D image.