The AlloSphere: Mixing 4-d entertainment and the scientific quest Within this brave new world, arteries, veins and organs are reconstructed digitally, projected in full 360 degree glory around us in the unique interactive environment of the AlloSphere. The AlloSphere is actually a ten metre high globe of immersive experiences housed on the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, nestling incongruously beside the sandy beaches and crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean. The driving force behind it is JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, originally a composer, who in the 1990s became passionate about the possibilities of visualising data in a way which would encourage creativity and incubate ideas. She made a pitch to the University of California, imagining an environment which could simulate the way we perceive the real world, which could be populated with data taken from any source. She struck lucky as Santa Barbara campus, renowned for hard sciences and engineering, was keen to become more interdisciplinary, appreciating that new solutions to some of the most interesting questions often emerge from the frontier between different ways of thinking. When I visited the AlloSphere, its potential was being demonstrated by Jamey Marth, who leads the Centre for Nanomedicine at the University. He is conducting leading-edge research into how best to deliver nano-sized particles into the blood stream to carry out a fatal blow to cancer cells without harming healthy cells along the way. He is using the AlloSphere to model and observe the treatment, and is even reviewing the data purely as sound, which Marth told me makes it much easier to detect if something unusual emerges. Over the next few months he will add real data about the densities, currents and eddies of our blood so he can also reconstruct human blood flow as part of his research, allowing a more detailed understanding of how an intervention flows to the affected area or gets lost along the way as it binds to the walls of our arteries, veins and capillaries. The AlloSphere is not cheap. Currently only one third complete, it has already cost about $12 million for the infrastructure alone. Some scientists dismiss it as a gimmick; since, unlike other scientific instruments, such as ever more powerful microscopes or telescopes, the AlloSphere does not deliver hard data or more accurate results. Rather, its unique attraction lies in painting digital pictures and sounds which allow us to understand experience and imagine worlds at the very frontier of our knowledge - worlds which ordinarily the body cannot enter, such as the minuscule interior of the tiniest capillary, or the massive nebula beyond our galaxy. As we explore further into these unknown worlds, data sets become ever more complex, so it becomes harder to make sense of them. But when you are literally surrounded by images and vibrations generated by the data, your body is able to respond intuitively, giving you creative ideas, thoughts and questions which would be far tougher to generate in a more traditional setting. For example, Dr Jatila Van der Veen, a Research Scientist in cosmology at The University, is putting in a proposal to employ the AlloSphere not only to visualise the depths of our universe, but also to use sound to reflect the fourth dimension, the perspective of time. She plans to track the gravitational waves which are supposed to have been generated by the Big Bang so that researchers will be able to listen to the way that time is bent near a black hole. There is also the entertainment value of the AlloSphere, in a part of the planet which has long celebrated playfulness. Tom Berson, a leading cryptologist who has spent thirty years in California said East Coast Americans tend to dismiss those on the West Coast as playing all day. "We don't just play," he chuckled. We work playfully, and are just as effective, only less serious. The AlloSphere is also part of a world in which three dimensional experiences are becoming the norm. My ten year old daughter felt deprived when the latest film release she saw was imprisoned in only two dimensions. Seeing the world in 3-D echoes a universal desire for us to be part of the experience, rather than separate from it. Indeed, on some level, it is a democratic transformation. The distance between the audience and the moving picture collapses as we are drawn inside the story, even if this merging of the viewer and the viewed is illusionary. At Universal Studios in Los Angeles, the new star attraction is a 4-D King Kong experience directed by Peter Jackson. We each become movie stars as dinosaurs growl around us and King Kong storms across the jungle to pick up and shake our tram. We see King Kong's hairy muscles flexing in three dimensions as water and fire is thrown at us. While they can't guarantee that King Kong will pay a visit to their laboratories, younger scientists increasingly expect to work in an environment which allows them to see and experience their data. Jamey told me that some of his older colleagues don't yet have a feel for this visualisation process and how best to apply it to their research. Yet the digital generation of researchers under the age of 30 all instinctively "get it." Today there is a call for better communication between specialists working in different fields, and between specialists and the rest of us. Visualisation can provide that bridge, giving the opportunity for others to become literally immersed in data outside their fields. For example, medical researchers are finding out ever more about how behaviour can affect our health, and may even affect the health of our unborn children, yet it can be hard to convince us to change our ways. Imagine if you could journey with your doctor inside an AlloSphere, with your body projected around you. You could actually witness the effects that smoking or your diet are having on your arteries, or play out scenarios to help you make decisions about which course of cancer treatment to follow. Currently the AlloSphere displays images in 16 million pixel detail, but with more funding, the ambitious JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is hoping to create images with 50 million pixels, creating a visual display mimicking what our human eye sees. The auditory environment will also be enhanced, with the team hoping to move from 16 sound channels to over a 100 by January, and then eventually to 512 channels, to mimic the sound environment enjoyed by our ears. When the AlloSphere achieves this level of sophistication, will we truly still be able to tell the difference between our journeys inside it and those within the surround-sound 3-D reality that encompasses our everyday lives? Emily Kasriel is the Executive Producer of The Forum (bbcworldservice.com/forum), the multidisciplinary ideas programme on the BBC World Service.