Advancing Water Resources Research and Management

Index

Introduction

Emerging Technology Trends

3D Visualization

Technology trends include an expansion of 2D visualization to an increasing use of 3D visualization.  Three dimensional renderings become more important as data sets and model outputs become larger and more complex.  The expanding market for home computer games has made 3D video cards more available and affordable.  Advances in the 3D graphics cards, coupled with increases in the power of desktop computers and a wider availability of software for 3D visualizations has made 3D visualization  more affordable and available to the desktop of a working scientist.
 

Click for larger image

Example of effect use of 3D visualization.  Discrete element soil model of a mine plow indicating stress on soil particles as the simulated plow moves through a soil mass.  [Scientific Visualization Center, Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station Major Shared Resource Center (CEWES MSRC)] http://www.wes.hpc.mil/

Interactive and immersive visualization and virtual reality

As 3D visualization becomes more available and more commonly used, emerging technologies, such as interactive and immersive visualization tools are becoming an important part of the scientific process.  Interactive and immersive visualizations  provide unparalleled power to explore data sets and to communicate what we learn in very new ways.   One very affordable example is the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML).  VRML  is a scene description language which allows users to access, navigate, explore and interact with environmental data in three dimensions with either with a web browser plug-in or with stand-alone, desktop software.  A VRML world  consists of virtual objects, such as  contoured 'slices', vector fields, bathymetry or topography, and textured surfaces.   These objects can be touched, rotated, or animated using controls that the browser provides.  This relatively new technology has been developed only over the last few years, and an international open standard has been accepted as of December, 1997. Shown below are two examples of successful applications of VRML to environmental datasets.  The figures show static 3D images, but when viewed with a web browser and the appropriate (free) plug-in, the user can interact with the visualization by moving into it, rotating it or animating it.
 
 

	Interactive VRML Atlas showing location of section lines collected during the Chesapeake Bay LMER project, called Trophic Interactions in Estuarine Systems, or TIES, began in 1995 and is scheduled to run until the year 2000. The project uses Chesapeake Bay to investigate mechanisms controlling secondary product ion in estuarine ecosystems. [Dr. Cathy M. Lascara, Old Dominion University] http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/~ties/ and  http://somali.ccpo.odu.edu:8080/~ties/atlas.html
	An animated, interactive VRML representation of Fisheries Oceanography model output showing bathymetry and fish larvae drift paths in the Shelikof Strait pollock spawning grounds.  The spheres are a primitive VRML geometry and their position, orientation, and color can be manipulated to reflect the modeled movement of fish in this coastal region.  [Dr. Al Hermann, NOAA/PMEL Fisheries Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (FOCI)] http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vrml
	This is a view from an animation of the current El Nino / La Nina evolving in the tropical Pacific Ocean. You are looking westward, across the equator in the Pacific Ocean, from a vantage point somewhere in the Andes Mountains in South America, in December 1998, in La Nina conditions. The colored surfaces show TAO ocean temperatures. The top surface is the sea-surface, from 8°N to 8°S and from 137°E to 95°W. The shape of the sea surface is determined by TAO Dynamic Height data. The wide vertical surface is at 8°S and extends to 500 meters depth. The narrower vertical surface is at 95°W. The animation frames show monthly values for the last 48 months. All of these data come from the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) network of  moored ocean buoys in Equatorial Pacific. [Dai McClurg, NOAA/PMEL/TAO) http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vrml

Stereographic visualizations

Today, 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 low cost PC, and very inexpensive red/blue glasses, the scientist can view these interactive 3D visualizations in stereo.  Although using the red/blue glasses requires the images to be viewed in grayscale rather than in color, the technique is highly effective.  For example, stereographic viewing allows one to easily distinguish the x- y- and z- direction of vectors, which is not easily determined, even with a 3D rendering, if it does not include stereo (below).  Shutter glasses are a powerful device for stereo viewing.  Using shutter glasses, still images and animations appear in glorious 3D color on the user's monitor.  The price is still quite modest, requiring an inexpensive PC, a 3D graphics card, and Crystal Eyes glasses.  An excellent discussion of the scientific value of 3D stereo imaging and  low cost techniques for utilizing it has been provided on the web by Dr. Al Hermann, at http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/~hermann/vrml/stereo.html.
 
 

Velocity vectors in a submarine canyon Dr. Al Hermann, NOAA/PMEL/FOCI  http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/~hermann/vrml/stereo.html.

Stereo version View with red/blue glasses (red on right eye) to see the images in 3D and stereo. Click to see a larger image.

Immersive Virtual Reality technology

Screen snapshots of a fisheries oceanography model output displayed on an ImmersaDesk at Old Dominion University. Additional screen snapshots at:  http://ccpo.odu.edu/~ramey/for_al.html. [Dr. Al Hermann, NOAA/PMEL,  Drs. Cathy Lascara and Glen Wheless, Old Dominion University]

Collaborative Virtual Environments

Defined as a key enabling technology by the Next Generation Internet project, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow multiple participants to collaborate using high-speed networks connecting heterogeneous computing resources and large data stores.  As such, CVEs extend the human/computer paradigm to include human/computer/human collaborations. The CVEs being developed today are prototyping the information infrastructure of the next century in terms of advanced networking, virtual reality, high performance computing, data mining, and human/computer interactions.

Today, collaboration technologies allow scientists to utilize fast networks to share a data visualization, animation or electronic document when the scientists are geographically separated.  Emerging collaboration technologies include video conferencing, Microsoft NetMeeting, Habanero, Tango and CORBA.  A very simple example illustrating the use of collaboration tools might be two scientists at two geographically separated universities wishing to discuss the quality of an environmental dataset.  In a collaborative environment, both scientists join the networked environment from the screens of their workstation (PC, Unix or Mac).  One scientist may select a dataset, and plot it - the plot appears on the screen for both scientists.  Then the second scientist wishes to point out a feature on the graph by pointing to it with a 'collaborative pointer', which is visible on both computer screens. Either scientist can add more data to the plots and point to features on the plots.  Other plots or documents (for example, related data, or calibration information) can be brought into the collaborative session by either scientist.  Functionally, this process is exactly the same as two scientists sitting together in a room holding pieces of paper and pointing to features on graphs as they talk.  The process is quite intuitive for the participants.  The screen snapshot below is an example of a such a collaborative tool in the Habanero environment:
 

OceanShare is a collaborative tool for integrated browsing of oceanographic and meteorological data from multiple geographically distributed archives.  OceanShare combines interactive Java graphics, Java RMI/CORBA network connections and the NCSA Habanero product to create networked access to distributed data sets in a collaborative tool environment for oceanographers. [Dr. Donald W. Denbo, NOAA/PMEL/OceanShare] http://www.epic.noaa.gov/collab/

Collaborative Virtual Environments

The word "collaboratory"  was coined to describe these networked collaboration processes:

"The fusion of computers and electronic communications has the potential to dramatically enhance the output and  productivity of U. S. researchers. A major step toward realizing that potential can come from combining the interests of the scientific community at large with those of the computer science and engineering community to create  integrated, tool-oriented computing and communication systems to support scientific collaboration. Such systems can be called "collaboratories."
National Collaboratories - Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research.  Committee on a National Collaboratory, National Research Council. National Academy Press, Washington, D. C., 1993.

Collaborative virtual environments have been defined as a key enabling technology by the Next Generation Internet (NGI) project.  A collaborative virtual environment allows multiple participants to collaborate using high speed networks to connect large, complex computing facilities and data stores.

Summary

"...greater connectivity will increase researcher demand for remote access to fully interactive 3D visualization and collaborative visualization sessions among groups of distributed researchers."
Trends in Graphics and Visualization.  DoD HPC Modernization Program, January 1998.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Vis/Publications/trends.html

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