Collaborative Visualization of Microbialites

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by Super User, 8 years ago
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Demonstration of the KeckCAVES Remote Collaboration approach and early implementation. Oliver (http://youtube.com/okreylos) is in the UC Davis VR lab in front of a 3D TV with an optical tracking system. Dawn (http://youtube.com/sumnerd) is in the fully immersive KeckCAVES (http://keckcaves.org) in a different building. Burak is in the VR lab using a desktop computer and a mouse. Two Kinects are capturing Oliver's image, and two are capturing Dawn's image. Burak's image is not being captured. Sound is shared among all three participants, although Burak doesn't say anything.

All viewers see the same data. Both Oliver's and Dawn's images are rendered in Burak's view. Only Oliver's image is rendered in Dawn's view, so she can see him and how he is moving, plus her own physical body. Only Dawn's image is rendered for Oliver. Burak's view is represented by a spherical avatar with orientation ornaments, and his mouse is represented by a cone. Oliver and Dawn have similar avatars that are sometimes visible in addition to their images.

This video is assembled from screen shots off Burak's monitor and precisely shows what he sees. The perspective of the video changes as Burak rotates his view with the mouse. Oliver and Dawn move relative to sample in the video when they rotate or scale their individual views relative to the data.

The software we are using is a special implementation of Vrui and Visualizer (see http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/), both written by Oliver and released by KeckCAVES.

The sample is an x-ray computed tomography scan of a stromatolite from Lake Joyce, Antarctica. See Hawes et al. 2010, Geobiology for a summary of these fascinating structures.

Software development is sponsored by NSF CI-TEAM, and Lake Joyce research is sponsored by NASA Astrobiology and NSF United States Antarctic Program.