HPCC Review

Part I: Immersadesk

Part II: VRML

Immersive Collaborative Virtual Environment

A Next Generation Internet (NGI) Testbed

Meetings attended:

• Supercomputing ‘99• AMS 2000• PMEL Open House

Several immersiveworlds created ...

FOCI on the Immersadesk

Fisheries-Oceanography: Sitka, AK

Al HermannSCRUM

topography - bluesalinity isosufacecurrents - whitetracers - red

Immersion works best

“Scientific visualization, exploiting the brain’s natural pattern recognition ability, is the best means available for making sense of large, complex scientific datasets.”

Animate

Hydrothermal Vents demo

Cave5d is Vis5d for the Cave/Immersadesk

Bill Lavelle’s model output of a plume event

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab

GFDL - predictive model forhurricane Floyd

September 9-17th, 1999

135 mph winds

Tsunami

Tsunami group

Vasily Titov

Quicktime movie andImmersadesk animation

Movie

Conclusions: Milestones passed

Insert milestones passed here…

On to next project

Construction of Complex 3-D Worlds

• Invited to:• NOAATech2000

• outstanding achievment award

• SuperComputing ‘99

• Canadian Statistical Society Meeting

• Other presentations:• AMS 1999 - Dallas

• GOIN 1999 - Honolulu

• AMS 2000 - Long Beach

Using VRML - Leveraging from 1998

Building a single, complex VRML world in FY98 gave us coding experience.

Creating Java/VTK tools for the creation of VRML objects allowed us to quickly make virtual reality demonstrations for several of the NOAA projects

A First Lesson

High frequency spikes in the bathymetry data are obvious in the 3D plot (right) and are obscured in the 2D plot above.

Calculations of bathymetry gradients to identify regions of internal tide generation would be impacted by these spikes in the bathymetry data.

Bathymetry in Astoria Canyon offshore from the Columbia River outflow in Washington State, in 2D and 3D.

Data courtesy of Robert Kamphaus, NOAA Vents Program

Building VRML Worlds - Java Tools

VTK is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, imageprocessing, and visualization.

Several Java tools using were designedto build the VRML worlds using VTK’sJava bindings:

Worlds we created using these tools include ...

VRML: TAO/GCCP

Data from the TAO buoy array and ship-board CO2 measurements are visualized with a VRML-animator developed at PMEL

Animate

VRML:FOCI

A Fisheries-Oceanography virtual world was made from data fromAl Hermann’s SCRUM model output

Click for VRMLdemo

Global data sets

Several globel gridded data setswere made into VRML visualizations:

• ETOPO30• SST• Climate data

VRML demo

Stereographic Virtual Reality

Courtesy of Al Hermann, NOAA/PMEL FOCI Project, under HPCC supported VRML project.

3D, interactive virtual reality visualizations are not difficult for a scientist to create or to view, from the web or from the desktop, and the effect can be enhanced dramatically by including the capability of stereographic viewing.

With a PC and a 99-cent pair of red/green sci-fi glasses, the spheres and vectors will pop out of the page in stereo, revealing the true 3D location of the fish, the steep slopes of the bathymetry, and the vertical motions near the submarine canyon.

The images can be rotated, animated and zoomed.

Fish larvae and velocity vectors in a submarine canyon, from a circulation model of Pribolof Canyon in the Bering Sea. Use red/green glasses to see images on the right in stereo.

Courtesy of Al Hermann, NOAA/PMEL FOCI Project, under HPCC supported VRML project.

Stereo

Stereo

Conclusions: Milestones passed

• Several Java-based VRML creation tools have been developed

• “Cron” jobs use these tools to update worlds using latest data

• Several professional meetings were attended, including three invited talks

• Virtual worlds created from NOAA projects:

• TAO

• FOCI

• VENTS