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December 5, 2005 Vol. 77, no. 14F
In Animal Planet reality show, graduate students naturally engineerCan you engineer a system as well as nature? That’s the underlying question behind a new reality TV show on Animal Planet called “Chasing Nature.” Two Berkeley graduate students answered the challenge when they and other top engineering students were flown to Australia to film the show. Ph.D. students Ilan Gur (MSE) and Anthony Levandowski (IEOR) star as two of the engineers-turned-cast members. “It was fun to do engineering outside the context of my Ph.D. research and to experience the making of a television show,” Gur says. “All in all, it was a fantastic experience.” In each episode, teams of students recreate some physical characteristic of a particular animal in a special effects studio doubling as a lab, then test their solution. Gur’s team was assigned to replicate the bat’s sonar-based echolocation; their task was to build something that would locate objects in a room for a teammate wearing a blindfold. The room was set up in a movie studio with access to the flying apparatus and harnesses used in the movie “Matrix.” Because they only had four days to complete the task, Gur says his initial reaction was to keep it simple. He proposed using the hoist system to drop pebbles around the room until one connected with an object and the sound changed. Low-tech, low-cost, problem solved. “But we found out that a bag of pebbles isn’t very marketable to a television audience,” Gur says, grinning. “The producers stepped in and asked for something more gadgety and neato.” So Gur and his teammates (ME engineers from the University of Illinois, MIT, and Stanford) came up with plan B: headgear that bounced light rays around the room and detected reflections, then converted the light signals into noise, like a Geiger Counter. The faster the beeping, the closer the object. The system worked, Gur says, though it was more complicated than necessary. During their filming, the four engineers discovered the rigors of TV production. They endured 12-hour days, multiple takes, long waits while shots were set up, one-on-one interviews, and the overall spectre of audience approval. But Gur says it was worth it. Without a little help, he wouldn’t have gotten on the show. An engineering friend recommended him to the producers, who interviewed him over the phone and asked for a videotape of him reading a script. Gur passed muster. “It’s an opportunity that sort of fell into my lap and I thought, ‘Why not? What’s one week?’” Looking back on his experience, Gur says he had a good time for a good cause. “I got the full experience out of it,” he says. “The show is geared to kids and families; I think it’s important to push the fun aspects of science and engineering to broader audiences. If nothing else, that’s definitely worthwhile.” Gur also came home with a little more understanding of a fellow mammal, the bat. “When you have an opportunity to stop and learn about an animal at such depth, it can be really profound. Mother Nature can out-engineer the best of us.” “Chasing Nature” starts December 6 on Animal Planet. Gur appears in episode seven and Levandowski in episode nine.
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