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Here we are at the Oceans Fair.

Jeff Leitz showing people the online exhibit.

Who are we?

What is the kelp forest exhibit modeling project?

Who is our intended audience?

• Scientific users interested in composing models in a 3D Web environment
• Educators and students of all ages
• General public

What does success look like?

• We are modeling tank dimensions, water flow, fish rendering and creature behavior with high fidelity.
• We are creating an exemplar site that demonstrates how to compose and render multiple dissimilar models using 3D graphics on the World Wide Web.
• Visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see the real kelp forest exhibit. It is astonishing.
• Another interesting link is the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Kelp Cam.

Who is doing the work?

• Graduate students (who else!) at the Naval Postgraduate School during the spring quarter April-June 1998.
• The first class of eight students UW3303 Modeling and Simulation examined a wide range of analytic simulation techniques. We modeled physics of the tank (water flow, hydrodynamics response) and basic biological motion behaviors (swimming, flocking, crawling).
• The second class of seven students CS4470 3D Image Synthesis "drew" and rendered all of the geometric structure and imagery, using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). Using VRML means this 3D site is viewable using standard Web browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer.
• Don Brutzman is the instructor for both courses. Additional projects are considered each time the course is taught.

What is the motivation for this project?

• By focusing on thoroughly modeling a controlled environment, we hope to produce an exemplar site for modeling larger and more sophisticated underwater domains.
• We can't reproduce the many glories of nature, but we can model and render reasonable facsimiles which demonstrate current state of the art.

Who has seen this work?

Public demonstration of this project was at the Oceans Fair: Friday June 12 1998 Ocean Fair Technology Pavilion Custom House Plaza in downtown Monterey, along with 60 other booths About 1000 people stopped by to see it, and 500 (mostly young people) sat down to try it Most frequent comment (even from kids): "cool!"
The Oceans Fair was part of the National Ocean Conference held in Monterey June 11-12 1998.
There is another National Ocean Conference link on the Year of the Ocean site.

What else?

Gee, it would be nice to include a networked scuba diver feeding the fish, using technology from Web3D Consortium Working Groups. For example, it might be great to integrate Human Animation (H-ANIM) avatars with vrml-streaming dis-java-vrml multicast networking. Or something else. Adding more fish is always a good idea. Stay tuned, we'll see.

Who else helped?

• Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA): Fran Wolfe, Bruce Gritton, Chris Harrold, Steve Webster and Ginger Hopkins
• Moss Landing Marine Labs (MLML): Ray McClain (class participant) and Rick Starr
• Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI): Mike McCann
• Fleet Numerical and Oceanographic Center (FNOC): Joe Cannon (class participant)
• Naval Postgraduate School (NPS): Stewart Liles, John Sanders, Don McGregor, John Locke, Jimmie Liberato, Howard Abrams and Mike Zyda

We gratefully acknowledge permission from the following photographers who helped contribute to the images archived on the fish page. Individual credits are provided next to the photos. Letters of permission appear in the hypermail archive. Please acknowledge these fine individuals if you use their images. All other images were collected as part of the kelp forest project.

• UCSB Marine Science Institute: Milton Love
• UCSC Department of Biology: Steve Lonhart
• Jody L. Haynes
• Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife: Bill Barss

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The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for this home page is http://web.nps.navy.mil/~brutzman/kelp/what.html