Qualcomm Institute's Virtual Reality Cave Offers 3D Experience And More Local News

Speaker 1: 00:00 It's Monday, September 2nd I'm Deb Welsh and you're listening to San Diego news matters from KPBS coming up. Researchers at the Qualcomm institute commemorate the Sun Cave second year and at the San Diego Museum of art, a new exhibit about African Americans living in southern California. To me, this whole thing is about making black art, African American art, giving it to the culture of San Diego that more San Diego news stories coming up right after the break. Speaker 2: 00:31 [inaudible]. Speaker 1: 00:33 Thank you for joining us for San Diego News Matters. I'm Deb Welch. Researchers at the Qualcomm institute at UC San Diego are commemorating the second year of the sun cave. KPBS science and technology reporter. Shelina. Jelani took advantage of the occasion to do some high tech spelunking or cave exploring. Yeah. Speaker 3: 00:53 [inaudible] Speaker 4: 00:54 within this 360 degrees structure, a bright and musical digital art piece is bouncing a wave of colored pixels. They're rendered on top of 74 k resolution screens and processed by 35 computers. Speaker 3: 01:08 Here we are in the sun cave. The Sun cave is a virtual reality environment that can display a half a billion pixels and it's with that the highest resolution virtual reality environment on the planet. Speaker 4: 01:24 Juergen Schultz, the computer scientists who developed the software for this project says no one has contradicted that statement Speaker 3: 01:30 to render vendor. It's just something on the cave walls. It's that's not that neat, but we then develop new algorithms that allowed us to render more points. Speaker 4: 01:38 The Sun cave is open tcsg researchers and companies that want to rent it out so they can display data in three dimensional formats such as a blood cell protein, a replica of an excavation site. The next step shall says is to figure out how to take this technology which soaks up the processing power and energy of nearly two computer labs to the next level. Shelina Trelawney KPBS News Speaker 1: 02:01 Warner Brothers is an entertainment company, best known for Harry Potter and Batman. It's now announced the opening of a new studio in San Diego. Sarah Casianos has more WB Games is the video game division of Warner Brothers best known for its DC and Harry Potter Games and they have opened a new mobile game studio in Carlsbad. Mobile Games are video games designed for mobile devices like iPhones. Miro Kopech was San Diego state and bottom line marketing told KPBS why San Diego is becoming a hub for mobile games. Why they want San Diego is because there's a lot of development talent. It's less expensive than La. Other studio locations are in San Francisco, Boston and New York. The new Carlsbad studio is hiring 15 job openings are listed on its website from business and engineering to art and design. Sarah kept Sianis KPBS news water customers in the city of San Diego. We'll be seeing another increase on a future bills but not quite as high as it could have been. Speaker 1: 03:02 KPBS as Maya Travolta, he breaks down the numbers, the increase which went into effect on September 1st as part of a yearly increase that was approved by the San Diego City Council back in 2015 and a letter reminding customers of the rate change. The city says the 4.82% increase. We'll pay for infrastructure, investments, quality testing and costs that are passed down from other agencies. Together with the almost one and a half percent increase from the San Diego County Water Authority. The total increase for this year is 6.28% this is a bit less than the 7% the city council projected for the 2020 fiscal year. The lower increase is due in part to the greater availability of local water and the departments refinancing of outstanding debt. Customers living in a single family home and using about 9,000 gallons of water a month. We'll see about a five and a half dollar increase on their monthly bill. My Etra C KPBS news, mental health experts in the advocates are weighing in on a California strategic plan for suicide prevention Capitol Public Radio, Sammy Kay law has to Dale's the last state suicide plan came out in 2008 the mental health services oversight and Accountability Commission is putting together a new version. Toby Ewing is the executive director. Speaker 5: 04:18 I think we know more about what is necessary in order to prevent suicide. There's more engagement with the public. These are conversations that people are having. Speaker 1: 04:29 The current draft recommends ramping up peer support networks, restricting access to guns and teaching healthy social media use in schools. Poshy walker with norcal mental health America pushed for more resources for LGBTQ youth and better data collection on suicide in this population. Speaker 5: 04:46 Just because they've made all kinds of recommendations doesn't mean that any of them will be taken into account. It will take advocates to make sure that the state is held accountable to those recommendations Speaker 1: 04:58 after the plan is approved by the commission, it goes to the legislature and the governor for consideration in Sacramento. I'm Sammy Kayla, the San Diego Museum of art has an exhibition about African Americans living in southern California that officially opened this weekend. The exhibit is called black life images of resistance and resilience. It's a collection of photos that tells the story of black people during the last half of the 20th century. The curator of the exhibit is Guy Ed Finney, who is the board chair of the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Arts midday edition. Host jade Heideman spoke with him at the San Diego Museum of art. Speaker 5: 05:37 So tell me about this exhibit. There are 40 black and white photos here, right? Yeah. This started almost two and a half years ago working with the San Diego Museum of art, trying to put together a project that would fit in this space that will showcase what the museum is about, which is showcasing African American culture. So we worked with California State University Northridge, who had some 23,000 images and we call through those images and got them into four categories. Um, entertainment, lifestyle, sports, and civil rights. Wow. And all of these photos, um, are really from a specific time period. Tell me about that. Uh, in my opinion, these really surround the changing of African American culture in the west coast. In other words, you have the people coming back from World War II, those soldiers who felt like when they came back from fighting for you as they should have a better shot at at life, you had the people who are migrating from the south coming north for jobs. Speaker 5: 06:40 You had the civil rights movement and the changes that, that affected people's culture. And then you also had just people living differently than they had been in earlier times. And so that is the period in which these exist. Okay. And it spans about what, 50 years? About 50 years. Oh, who are some of the notable names in these photos? Everyone's got it. Every picture has something very special about it. Yeah. And so as we look through these images, we call them through at California State Northridge, we tried to find those that would relate to the community. So we have Diana Ross in Muhammad Ali and James Brown and politicians, Malcolm x and Martin Luther King. You've got a Stokely Carmichael and mark and, uh, Muhammad Ali. So there's quite a few different things, things that people can relate to, uh, who come to visit it and I think they will want them to take something home from, from seeing. Speaker 5: 07:33 How difficult was it to find, um, photos that you feel people could relate to and that would resonate with people? I mean, you had hundreds upon hundreds of pictures to look through. Yeah. It wasn't easy. Um, and that's the job of curating as to Kinda get it down to two year theme. And it was just a matter of just slowly going through them, trying to relate myself and with my board who helped me, uh, to pick out these images to get the ones that we have. Who captured these, these photos? Guy Crowder, Clarence Williams and Harry Adams. Those are the ones that they have a lot of collection from. But um, there are those photographers who captured them and they, did they work for the publications or, no, oddly enough, these photographers during that time, they couldn't get jobs. They was very little. The Associated Press wasn't hiring them. The UPI wasn't hiring them, so they had to create their own. Speaker 5: 08:23 They also would create a school of photography for African American photographers. So it really was organic because later on you get more pretty pictures but they would just trying to get paid someone and so they, they did this for the black newspapers for the most part in La, Los Angeles area. How important do you think a exhibits like these are two sort of moving the culture forward and to and to sort of keeping the stories of the black community here in southern California live? Well, you hit the nail on the head with that one because the reason that the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Arts exists is for that very reason is to keep the culture alive, keep it moving forward, and to give people a history that they can recognize and talk about and become part of themselves. I mean to me this whole thing is about making black art, African-American art, giving it to the culture of San Diego. Yes, African American culture, but for the whole community of San Diego. And that's why we exist is to bring that out guy, and if any, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. Speaker 1: 09:25 Thanks for listening to San Diego News matters. If you're not already a subscriber, take a minute to become one. You can find San Diego news matters on apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.