You don't know what's in / Anaheim. / Why don't you come with me (little girl) / on a magic carpet ride?
At this year's NetQoS invitation-only Networkers After-Party at the House of Blues in Disneyland Anaheim, we're going to bring you what we call the Netcosm Immersion Experience.
The Netcosm Immersion Experience will take our Netcosm tech demo and project it on the inside of a walk-in cube on the dance floor of the House of Blues - 25 feet by 35 feet, 10 feet tall. (Okay, that's a not exactly a cube, but why get pedantic?)
It will be a full immersion video experience with sights, quadrophonic sounds, colors, and the digital pyrotechnics, navigable with a gyromouse. And the experience will be enhanced with "Netcosmopolitan" drinks. (They're just like regular cosmopolitans, except blue, with a dash of portmanteau added for flavor.)
If you're attending the NetQoS Networkers After-Party, you'll be able to literally walk inside a living model of an enterprise network.
(We do not suggest partaking of any illegal narcotic substances before or during the Netcosm Immersive Experience. The Netcosm Immersive Experience is simply enough to blow your mind and alter your reality without any pharmaceutical assistance. Besides, the last stoner I knew who went to Disneyland still has nightmares about "six-foot-tall rats".)
(Continued...)
This is in addition to the food and live music performed by Blues Gone South. We'll provide shuttle service to and from the House of Blues and the Anaheim Convention Center from 7:00 p.m. until midnight so you can relax and enjoy the fun.
In case you need a reminder of what Netcosm is, allow me to explain: Netcosm provides a three dimensional, animated model of network traffic. It's part of the NetQoS Performance Labs' efforts at finding ways to display complex network monitoring information visually.
Human brains are hardwired by evolution to react to light, sound and motion, and while detail can be found by looking at charts and graphs, Netcosm is designed to give people instant information that registers immediately. When the model's network packets explode and a server icon starts smoking and later goes up in flames, you know you have a problem without even having to think about it. (There's a part of the "reptilian hind brain" that goes, "Fire bad!" And sometimes, after long slogs at the data center fueled only by caffeine, determination, and rage, the reptilian hind-brain is the only part of the brain functioning at peak efficiency.)
And of course, by adding an "aspect of play" to network traffic data you lower the cognitive burden, and make network data something people want to spend time with and examine, rather than something they dread looking at day after day. And yes, the fact that we're bringing an "aspect of play" to Networkers at Disneyland is no coincidence.
The Netcosm project was created by Dr. Mike Johns, and the Netcosm Immersion Experience extension of that work is based on the work of Dr. John Schull, associate professor of IT at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and some of his students.
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More Information:
On Netcosm:
Downloadable Netcosm network monitoring clip
You've never seen a networking tool like this. (Unless, of course, you've seen TRON).
Being Tron Malkovitch - or This is your brain on Netcosm
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A Network Monitoring Dome Decree - RIT professor displays Netcosm on 12' immersive dome.
Rethinking Network Monitoring: The Re-Juvenilization of IT
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