Dr. David Borland, a Senior Visualization Researcher at the RENCI@UNC Engagement Center, has several visualizations of airflow models of Manhattan featured in ‘American Scientist‘.
These visualizations were done in collaboration with Dr. Allen Huber with the Institute for the Environment at UNC. RENCI has a short feature on the project that explains the goals of the research.
This afternoon, folks from UNC, NC State, UNC Asheville, and Duke met to talk about common interests in visualization tools such as the Unity3d game engine.
Everyone discussed current projects and ideas, and some common threads were found:
This is an informal group, but we hope to trade notes, ideas, and code as projects evolve! Here’s a shot of the group meeting in the Social Computing Room, along with remote participants via the Vidyo system at RENCI.
Meeting about Unity game engine at RENCI
3D modeling and animation is a field that has seen tremendous improvements on almost every front over the last twenty years. Starting with complex software limited to expensive “big iron” SGI computers, 3D software has now become another desktop standard, with extremely powerful tools available on all platforms. The price point has also come down to earth, so that there are even open-source freeware products that have near-parity with the major commercial players. Virtually every facet of the computer has “gone 3D”, with display systems most recently playing catch-up. Everyone is familiar with 3D games and simulations, and with high-gloss applications like 3D animation for movies. But even many Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) now look 3D.
The RENCI Engagement Site at UNC-Chapel Hill includes 3D modeler/animators on staff, as well as other experts in 3D content creation. We have deep experience in creating both pre-rendered animated content for display and real-time interactive 3D content such as simulations and games. We can help collaborators navigate the complex waters of 3D content creation. Our on-site display environments–the Showcase Dome, Social Computing Room and Tele-Immersion Room–are ideal areas for displaying 3D content, and we can assist with running these rooms as well. Creation tools include a 3D desktop scanner as well as traditional 3D software.
Computation has become integral part of scientific inquiry. In the fields of chemistry, biology, genetics, physics, and every other area of the sciences, modeling, simulation, and computation provide new insights. Just as important as the data and the algorithms that produce the data is the ability of researchers to interperet complex information. Scientific visualization techniques allow researchers to comprehend their data, understand relationships, and acheive new insights into their research.
Scientific visualization brings together computation, computer graphics, domain science, and graphic arts to turn huge numerical data sets into meaningful graphical representations. These representations can be a picture, an animation, or a fully interactive application that allows a researcher to manipulate and ask new questions about their data.
Information visualization is a related field. Information visualization is similar to scientific visualization, but deals with information that does not have a 2D or 3D structure. An example of information visualization would be a graphic representation of the relation between documents in an archive.
RENCI@UNC-CH is a unique resource for the UNC campus. An important feature of the engagement center is the group of powerful and unique visualization environments located in the ITS-Manning building on the South Campus. The Showcase Dome, Teleimmersion, and the Social Computing room support the research and teaching misson of the University by providing a state-of-the-art venue for scientific visualization, new media and digital humanities, geospatial and geoinformatics research, bioinformatics and health sciences visualization, and advanced collaboration.
It is important to note that graphical display capabilities are a primary feature of each of the environments, however, each environment also has a wide range of audio/video capabilities, sensors and interaction devices of different types, and a flexible architecture that allows augmentation with additional audio/video, sensor, and robotic equipment to serve particular requirements of a collaboration.
RENCI@UNC-CH is pleased to provide tours of the visualization resources, and to work to enable the use of these spaces by the campus community in an effort to foster new research and learning endeavors.
Each of the spaces can be visited by clicking on the links below.
