3D visualization of astronomy data cubes using immersive displays

07/29/2016
by   Gilles Ferrand, et al.
0

We report on an exploratory project aimed at performing immersive 3D visualization of astronomical data, starting with spectral-line radio data cubes from galaxies. This work is done as a collaboration between the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manitoba. We are building our prototype using the 3D engine Unity, because of its ease of use for integration with advanced displays such as a CAVE environment, a zSpace tabletop, or virtual reality headsets. We address general issues regarding 3D visualization, such as: load and convert astronomy data, perform volume rendering on the GPU, and produce physically meaningful visualizations using principles of visual literacy. We discuss some challenges to be met when designing a user interface that allows us to take advantage of this new way of exploring data. We hope to lay the foundations for an innovative framework useful for all astronomers who use spectral line data cubes, and encourage interested parties to join our efforts. This pilot project addresses the challenges presented by frontier astronomy experiments, such as the Square Kilometre Array and its precursors.

READ FULL TEXT

page 7

page 8

research
07/30/2019

Artifact-Based Rendering: Harnessing Natural and Traditional Visual Media for More Expressive and Engaging 3D Visualizations

We introduce Artifact-Based Rendering (ABR), a framework of tools, algor...
research
04/27/2016

A Collaborative Untethered Virtual Reality Environment for Interactive Social Network Visualization

The increasing prevalence of Virtual Reality technologies as a platform ...
research
12/01/2022

Corvo: Visualizing CellxGene Single-Cell Datasets in Virtual Reality

The CellxGene project has enabled access to single-cell data in the scie...
research
03/25/2019

Retracing and assessing the CEP project

The last decade witnessed a renewed interest in the development of the I...
research
04/30/2021

Lux: Always-on Visualization Recommendations for Exploratory Data Science

Exploratory data science largely happens in computational notebooks with...
research
10/15/2021

Astronomical source finding services for the CIRASA visual analytic platform

Innovative developments in data processing, archiving, analysis, and vis...
research
10/25/2021

Semantic Resizing of Charts Through Generalization:A Case Study with Line Charts

Inspired by cartographic generalization principles, we present a general...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset