A new laboratory will bring the latest in animation technology to the College of Design. The Charles Durham Visualization Lab, funded by an $85,000 donation from Charles Durham of the Hemingson, Durham, Richardson firm out of Omaha, Neb., will enhance the ability of personnel at the College of Design to do animation, video editing and other electronic visualization, said Mike Miller, system support specialist for the College of Design. The lab, located on the fifth floor of the Design Building, will have a variety of equipment including PC, Macintosh and UNIX computers; a wide format scanner and a three-dimensional digitizer, Miller said. Also, nonlinear video editing equipment was ordered, which allows users to mix video and audio clips into a cohesive project, he added. “It will give us the opportunity to run some software that we don’t currently have the computer horsepower to run,” he said. The lab will not be complete by the scheduled finish date, initially set for the second week of September. Mark Engelbrecht, dean of the College of Design, said all the equipment has been ordered, but they have to wait for everything to arrive. Miller predicted it will be done after Oct. 1. “We’re disappointed we didn’t have it ready for the start of the term,” Engelbrecht said. Once it is completed, the Charles Durham Visualization Lab will be the only lab on campus to have this type of equipment in one place, said Steve Herrnstadt, associate professor of art and design. Herrnstadt said the Charles Durham Visualization Lab is not a virtual reality lab, but it will provide a way to import, manipulate and export synthetic or video images. Images created in the Howe Hall virtual reality lab, known as the C6 lab, can be used in the new visualization lab and vice versa. “I’m looking forward to the new directions it will give us,” Herrnstadt said. The new lab is one step toward a major goal for the design college. The new lab is in the process of becoming a Labs of Forward Technology, or LoFT. The concept is to have all the graduate design programs on one floor and “provide them with up-to-date information technologies,” Engelbrecht said. “The basic idea is to get our most advanced students and graduate faculty up there, let them mix it up and see what happens,” he said. Various friends, alumni and firms have donated $250,000 for the LoFT project, including the visualization lab. Twenty years ago, when the College of Design was constructed, all the programs came from different colleges. Each area of study took a different floor in the College of Design and were separated from each other. “By doing this with the LoFT, it has allowed us to reshuffle the whole deck,” Engelbrecht said. The LoFT and Durham Visualization Lab are “going to have interesting and ultimately very beneficial effects,” he said. The visualization lab is one of a series of new structures in the College of Design. These projects are collectively known as Threshold 2000. The dedication ceremony for Thereshold 2000 will take place Sept. 9 at 10 a.m. in the Design Building atrium.