125 Stanford Stories

NO. 54
Stanford Today

Putting big data on the big screen

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Clinical instructor Lakshminarayan Srinivasan and graduate student Bryan He of Stanford’s Neural Signal Processing Laboratory demonstrate their brain research at the Hive ( HANA Immersive Visualization Environment ) in October 2015.
Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service
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Mechanical Engineering Prof. Charbel Farhat uses the Hive in 2014 to visualize the effects of turbulence on aircraft.
Stanford School of Engineering
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Stanford’s Center for Design Research presents video and data on its Interactions Dynamics Notation, a visual language that records the dynamics of working through a creative problem, at the Hive in March 2016.
Chris Bennett

“We do big math.”

— Prof. Margot Gerritsen, director of Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering

With a display field 10 feet tall and 24 feet wide, Stanford’s Hive (HANA Immersive Visualization Environment) combines 35 individually controllable screens into a 72-million-pixel collaborative visualization tool.

Student mathematicians, engineers, scientists and designers use the Hive’s multiple screens to see complex data in whole and in part. Investigating visual structures from vehicle diagrams to fractals, they draw deep insight and inspiration. They probe various aspects of data collection, simulation, modeling and visualization in unprecedented detail.

The facility opened in 2014 in Huang Engineering Center and is operated by Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME), an entity that designs algorithms and furthers computational mathematics in collaboration with six of Stanford’s seven schools. The Hive is open to all Stanford students, faculty and staff.

Recent Hive demonstrations have included Stanford research on driverless cars; on a visual language for solving creative problems called Interactions Dynamics Notation; and on work by Stanford’s Peace Innovation Lab in using game design to promote empathy.

Learn more about the Hive in this video.