Olumide Fashakin

This project uses the 360 Degree Panoramic Display Space. It aims to create an immersive 360° educational video experience that takes viewers on a compelling journey through the entire food system, from the soil where seeds are cultivated, through farming activities like tilling, planting, and harvesting (highlighting crops such as cereals and legumes), to food processing methods such as roasting and grinding, which impact nutritional quality.

The journey continues into laboratories where nutrient analyses reveal the hidden value in our foods, then transitions to the consumer side/farmers’ markets, grocery stores, and family kitchens, where food choices are made. It concludes with a reflective message, urging viewers to consider the interconnectedness of food systems, nutrition, and sustainability.

Jacob Fortman

The philosopher Henri Bergson conceptualized time not as a series of discrete, measurable units—seconds, minutes, hours—but as a continuous flow of experience. In this view, the past does not simply disappear; it endures and is woven into the present. This understanding places time on different ontological and phenomenological grounds than our common-sense view, which tends to treat time as a linear succession of moments that fade into the past.

To illustrate this idea, Bergson famously compared time to the experience of listening to a melody. When we hear a melody, we do not perceive each note in isolation. Rather, each note is held in memory and felt in relation to those that came before it, forming a continuous and evolving whole. In other words, we experience a melody not as a series of separate events, but as an unfolding duration—a durée—in which past and present interpenetrate. This understanding of time resonates with Bergson’s metaphysical commitments and process philosophy more generally, which understands ontology - the nature of being and becoming - as a continuous process devoid of enduring substances.

This project draws on Bergson’s conception of durée, or lived time, to explore the temporal experience of listening to music in immersive visual environments. Specifically, I aim to understand how visual and auditory sensations interact to shape our perception of time—not as a ticking clock, but as an elastic, affectively charged, and embodied phenomenon.
The 360-degree Degree Panoramic Display serves as a unique site for this research inquiry. Its spatial and sensory enclosure intensifies attention and invites listeners to inhabit the musical moment more fully. In such a setting, how do participants describe their experience of time? Does it slow down? Speed up? Prefigure its future? Evoke memories of the past? Through reflective interviews and observational data, this research traces the phenomenological contours of immersive musical experience. In doing so, it offers both empirical and philosophical insight into the phenomenological experience of temporality.

Richard Gumbel

This project uses the 360 Degree Panoramic Display Space in the Digital Scholarship Lab. It features a series of animations that depict nuclear collisions. I have already performed a systematic study of two ‘hot fusion reactions’: calcium-48 + uranium-238, and titanium-50 + thorium-236–both with the intended aim of synthesizing the transactinide (i.e. super heavy nucleus or element with Z > 103) copernicium-286.

The graphical modeling that I create is pulled from scientific computations typically performed on a computer cluster, like the HPCC here at MSU. From these computations, I can create 3D and 2D images, that capture some of the physics taking place when two nuclei collide.

Ritesh Khandelwal

As a third-year Ph.D. student working on comics, my work primarily revolves around analytical, publishing, and pedagogical contexts within the medium. The IVI program helped me familiarize with innovative platforms and gain important skills to optimize my pedagogical outlook centering on this idiosyncratic form. My project, “Close-Reading Comics (Empirically!),” proposes a class module to optimize close reading of comics within the 360 Degree Panoramic Display Space.

Deploying the 360 Room technology within the comics context draws from Allan Paivio's "dual coding theory," first formulated in 1971, and the "picture superiority effect," wherein words and images contribute to readerly comprehension, which can then materialize significantly in a classroom environment. The method also draws from empirical comics research from scholars, including Lydia Wysocki and Neil Cohn, among others.

The technology will allow students to literally zoom in on the comics text, enabling a study of minutiae not possible in conventional classroom settings. Specific comics texts, mainly independently produced and highly experimental in nature, which have been instrumental in advancing the medium's potential, will benefit from this more heightened approach to reading and understanding comics. Examples include works by Alison Bechdel, Olivier Schrauwen, and Chris Ware, making this project a prime opportunity to familiarize students with global comics traditions and narrative innovations.

Sylvia Lin

The purpose of this project, entitled “Understanding Neighborhood Influences on Asian American Adolescents’ Ethnic Labeling,” is to elevate the voices of Asian American adolescents and what places, spaces, and symbols (i.e., sociocultural symbols) they found important in (and out) of their neighborhoods. Asian American adolescents created collages with sociocultural symbols that informed their ethnic-racial identity.

In a focus group, they talked about what it means to be Asian American, what it means to be [ethnic identity], and how sociocultural symbols informed their understanding of those questions. This project will utilize the 360 Degree Panoramic Display Space to display the collages like an art gallery. In addition to the collages, integrating Google Street View and 360 Videos of the places adolescents identified will immerse viewers and enhance viewer understanding of what it means to be Asian American in a Midwestern city.

Devika Padmakumar

The objective of this project is to create a 360-degree video to be played in the dome of Abrams Planetarium. A short video will be made about some cool facts about the moon including its formation, its interior. The video should be able to explain some interesting questions like ‘Why does the moon look all white?’ Something that can be added to this is information about all the missions to the moon so far, including the landing site details. The videos will be created in a way that is both useful and understandable to kids and the general public.

MeiLi Papa

This project aims to develop an immersive visualization tool for hyperspectral microscope image data. Hyperspectral imaging captures information across a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum (300–1000 nm) and provides both rich spectral and spatial detail. Traditional 2D visualizations on small screens often fail to convey the full complexity of these datasets. Through the Immersive Visualization Institute (IVI), I utilized the 360 Degree Panoramic Display Space as an innovative platform to display hyperspectral microscope data in an immersive environment, enabling a more intuitive and accessible way to interpret and explore intricate spectral data.

Maura Philippone

“Journey to the Intervention Dimension” is a gamified activity for graduate students who are training to become speech-language pathologists (SLPs). It uses the 360 Degree Panoramic Display Space in the Digital Scholarship Lab. In these modules, students use their auditory-perceptual and clinical skills to identify their client’s diagnosis and appropriate interventions within the “Intervention Dimension.” The gamified structure and simulated case studies provide a low-risk, failure-friendly environment in which students can build their clinical skills as they prepare to provide SLP services for clients.

Ellie Xia

This project, entitled “Where Does ‘Not’ Go?,” uses the Science On a Sphere. Language is constantly changing. Cultural and historical factors – such as migration, colonialism, and education – shape the structure of speech. The words we use for different things can change between places. (For example, do you feel strongly about the word “soda” or “pop”?) Word choice isn't the only variation on speech - even something as simple as where in a sentence you place a word like “no” or “not” can have meaning. Although every language can do this, the way they actually put “not” in a sentence can be very different.

In many Bantu languages spoken across Africa, the way “not” appears in a sentence depends on the structure of the sentence — for example “She is not running” or “I think she is not running.” This study maps how the position of the “not” marker varies across Bantu languages: in some, it comes before the subject; in others, after the verb or even at the end of the sentence. This gives us insight into how grammar interact inside a language family, revealing the beauty of diversity and complexity of negation across languages. Using geospatial visualization tools, I show a dynamic linguistic map that shows where each language’s negation markers appear, placed geographically across Africa.