SIGGRAPH 2015: VR Village

  • Released Monday, August 3, 2015
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These visualizations were created for the planetarium dome show film called Dynamic Earth, produced by Tom Lucas in cooperation with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Spitz, Inc. Their format is in a fish-eye projection, called domemaster, which is why they look circular. In a dome, the image fills the dome's hemisphere so that the parts near the bottom of the image are low and in front of the viewer, the top of the image is behind the viewer, and the left and right sides are to the left and right of the viewer. The domemaster format was created by rendering 7 separate 2048x2048 camera tiles: 6 at different rotational angles aroung the center axis and one looking overhead. The tiles were then reprojected and stitched together to form the final domemaster at a 4096x4096 resolution.

Wind and Ocean Circulation for the Dynamic Earth Dome Show

Visualizer: Greg Shirah and Horace Mitchell

Wind and Ocean Circulation camera slowly pushes in towards the Earth revealing global wind patterns. The wind patterns are from the MERRA computational model of the atomsphere. As the camera continues to push in, the winds fade away, revealing ocean currents which are driven, in part, by the winds. The ocean currents are from the ECCO-2 computational model of the oceans and ice. Only the higher speed ocean currents are shown. The camera moves around the Western Atlantic highlighting the Gulf stream from above and below. The camera finally emerges from beneath sea level and moves over to the Gulf of Mexico to examine the Loop Current.

This shot is designed to seamlessly match to the end of the Earth/CME shot (animation id #3551.). Topographic features are exaggerated 20 times above water and 40 times below water. The exaggeration is primarily to allow the viewer to distinguish the depths of the flow fields.

For more details and to download other media formats, click here.

Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice for the Dynamic Earth Dome Show

Visualizer: Cindy Starr

Summary:

This animation shows the actual advance and retreat of the Arctic and the Antarctic sea ice as seen in satellite data. The day-to-day changes portrayed in the sea ice are derived from a running 3-day average sea ice concentration data in the region where the sea ice concentration is greater than 15%. The blueish white color of the sea ice is derived from a 3-day running miniimum of the AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperature data. The animation ends by flying over the Antarctic Peninsula.

For more details and to download other media formats, click here.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Monday, August 3, 2015.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:49 PM EDT.