Losses shut down multimedia center

  PATIL ARMENIAN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff The UCLA
Visualization Center in the basement of the Geology building is
closing after four years because it was losing money.

By Barbara Ortutay
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The UCLA Visualization Center closed its doors permanently
Thursday for financial reasons after four years in existence.

The center, located in the basement of the Geology Building,
served students, faculty and researchers in various departments,
providing multimedia resources for presenting data visually.

“I regret having to do it, but at some point there are
certain things it’s just not possible to have
available,” said Roberto Peccei, dean of physical sciences
and vice chancellor of research. “The center has been losing
money for a long time.”

“The question is whether this really high-end service
could be subsidized at the level it has been,” he
continued.

Funded through grants and the physical sciences division of the
College of Letters and Science, it cost more than $100,000 to keep
the center open each year, Peccei said.

The center provided facilities for data imaging, animation and
image processing, among other things.

It is not going to reopen, but according to its director, Bruce
McCrimmon, the university plans to provide the resources it offered
in other ways.

But students, researchers and faculty who used the center to
prepare class projects and presentations said they regret the
closing.

“I’m extremely concerned because I think we’re
losing a resource. The slack won’t easily be taken up by
someone else,” said Anne McGlynn, senior editor of the
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

Before the center closed, McGlynn said she used its lab a couple
of times per month for the expertise and resources, which included
an audio-video facility and a poster printer.

“(The staff) is extremely knowledgeable about Adobe
products and have a keen interest in the program. They go the extra
mile,” she said.

The center opened at its current location in 1996, but served
UCLA for years before that, according to McCrimmon. Open five days
a week, the center served departments ranging from engineering to
physical sciences to architecture. According to the center’s
Web site, the focus of visualization is to present non-visual data
as images for better understanding.

“The images created may serve to represent things not
readily observed by the naked eye: molecules, galaxies, alien life
forms and so forth,” the site states.