Do you remember Lite-Brite? The toy with small colored plastic pegs that create illuminated designs on a light board? Well scientists and designers have taken the concept to a new level. They’ve created a display at the ECHO Center for Lake Champlain to visually display data about the lake.
More than 7,500 LED lights dangle at the entry of the ECHO Lake Science Center in a 12-foot-by-12-foot-by-6-foot cube. Each bulb can be individually programmed to create a visual representation of Lake Champlain data, including temperature, storms, algae blooms and more.
As people gather on the second floor to observe the display, Lake Brite Project Manager Rachel Hooper describes the visualization lighting up in front of them. “This is a cutting edge installation. This is the only piece that exists that is a 3D data visualization platform and it’s right here on Burlington’s waterfront. Let’s start with the August 4th Doppler scan storm. We’re looking at radar data just moving through this cube. As you can see it was a really rapid storm.”
Hooper says Lake Brite is an effort to bring data to people in a way that is fun and sparks curiosity. “Right now in the early stages what we’re playing with are all of the metrics that are gathered in the 15 different stations around Lake Champlain. Things like temperature over time, phosphorus, nutrient data, clarity of the water, all things that when you put them together start to paint a picture of the health of Lake Champlain.”
ECHO Executive Director Phelan Fretz says within a few months, interactive kiosks will be placed both inside and outside the facility to help the public understand the data visualizations. “We’re opening a platform for communicating important information. Data visualization is about Lake Champlain. This is the first installation in the country.”
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Dean and Professor Nancy Mathews is excited to see the new data visualization tool. “This is a cool idea. Imagine all the data that you could gather on the lake ecosystem of Lake Champlain from water quality to fish behavior to invertebrates to the influence of precipitation and climate change and try to make sense out of that. And for big data we need new and innovative techniques to help us visualize and understand these patterns.”
Senator Patrick Leahy was among those mesmerized by the display. “I get more excited every time I come here because of innovation. But the thing that excites me the most is watching the young people who get excited. We can sometimes forget that this is all a learning process. This, and what Google and what everybody else has done, helps with that learning process.”
Google is funding Lake Brite. Google Analytics Evangelist Justin Cutroni says they were seeking a cutting edge project that intersects art and science. “Look at this thing! It’s 24 feet wide. It’s 9 feet tall. It’s 6 feet deep. That’s 1,300 cubic feet of light. Lake Brite can bring data visualization to the entire community and more importantly information about the health of our lake.”
One of those watching the display asked if the visualization methods could be used to study the human body or be used in other applications. Cutroni says this project, the first of its kind in the world, is in its initial phases. But they can already imagine other applications. “Data now is ubiquitous in every discipline, right, whether it’s figuring out traffic or medicine or education. So there’s no shortage of data. Obviously having lake data is wonderful because that something that’s right here and very relevant to this building and its mission. But we’re excited that this could be a way to visualize lots of different types of information.”
A link to a video of Lake Brite:
