NCSA NEWS

Alliance Members Help Create New Planetarium's Virtual Tour of the Universe

released February 1, 2000

 

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Karen Green
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CHAMPAIGN, IL -- When the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York opens its new Hayden Planetarium in February, its state-of-the-art Space Theater will give visitors a glimpse of the wonders of the universe, thanks in part to visualizations and technologies provided by the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) and its leading-edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

The Alliance Cosmology team, which includes the AMNH, and the NCSA Virtual Director team recently helped the museum develop its first digital dome presentation that allows audiences to fly through an astronomically accurate portion of the universe and to view simulations that show how large-scale structures, such as giant clusters of galaxies, may have formed. The animated film will be shown to audiences on the Space Theater's Digital Dome System, part of the new Hayden Planetarium. The planetarium is the centerpiece of the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, a new 333,500 square-foot exhibition and research facility set to open at the AMNH in February. Museum donors and others who paid up to $5,000 each had a sneak peak at the film and the new facility at a New Year's Eve gala.

The Digital Dome System creates its real-time virtual universe using actual astronomical data. Some of the data comes from Brent Tully, an Alliance Cosmology team member at the University of Hawaii. Tully's database of 35,000 observed galaxies represents all known galaxies within an area 700 million light years across centered at the Earth. This "local" region of the universe is rich in structural details and, with Virtual Director, can be rendered into an animation that people can "fly" through.

Virtual Director is a software program created by Donna Cox, an NCSA researcher and professor in the U of I School of Art and Design, Robert Patterson of NCSA, and Marcus Thiebaux of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Virtual Director allows users who are creating visualizations from computer simulations to navigate through large datasets, record and edit their movements through the data, and collaborate remotely by sharing tracker and camera data. In essence, Virtual Director allows the user to navigate through a complex simulation and choreograph -- or direct -- with a virtual camera to create a movie.

Virtual Director was also used to choreograph and create animations of datasets by Cosmology team members Jeremiah Ostriker, of Princeton University, and his post-doctoral researcher Paul Bode. Ostriker's and Bode's computer simulations -- the largest cosmological simulation yet performed used NCSA's 256-processor SGI Origin2000 array for more than a week -- track more than 1 billion particles as they move under the influence of gravity in a representative piece of the universe. Cox, Patterson, and Stuart Levy, the Virtual Director software developer at NCSA, developed techniques for visualizing and integrating these beautiful datasets.

In total, the NCSA team rendered about four minutes of visualizations from the data provided by Tully, Ostriker and Bode, utilizing more than 53,000 images at a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels. Each full dome image consists of seven 1280 x 1024 images. These images were then edge blended to create a single seamless representation. The full Digital Dome presentation is a 17-minute grand opening program that combines Tully's database of the actual distribution of galaxies, Ostriker's theoretical simulations of large scale structure, visualizations from the planetarium's own database of the Milky Way, called the Digital Galaxy, and data from NASA and the European Space Agency's Hipparcos database. The Digital Galaxy, NASA and Hipparcos data were rendered by a team at AMNH. The Digital Dome System uses an SGI Onyx2 Infinite Reality2 system and Trimension's display and integration technology to bring audiences the animated astronomical imagery. Final rendering of the images was done using Pixar's Renderman and StarRenderer.

"What we've done is use Virtual Director to combine various datasets -- both theoretical and from actual observation -- to create an immersive digital display that gives people the perception they are flying through the universe, taking a tour across vast scales and seeing how our home galaxy fits into the enormous structure of the observable universe," said Cox. "This is one of the most accurate depictions of what it might be like out there -- for now, it's about as close as we can get to the real thing."

The project is a high-impact way for one of the Alliance's scientific teams to reach out to a large, general audience, added Mike Norman, an NCSA researcher and Alliance Cosmology team member who consulted on the project. "Our simulations represent some major scientific work that couldn't have even been done without the Alliance commitment to capability computing (large-scale scientific computing jobs)," he said. "It's exciting to share this work with the public through the AMNH and the Hayden Planetarium. People will be able to see what's really out there in the universe and experience phenomena that we haven't actually seen but have theorized about."

The Virtual Director group, and the Alliance Cosmology team will continue to work with the AMNH Hayden Planetarium now that the Digital Dome System and its first presentation is complete. One future project includes developing Digital Dome presentations that can be controlled in real-time from the CAVE at NCSA.

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

    The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund NCSA.

 

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