Scottsdale Unified School District

Decision Theater has been developing an open-source application, Minerva, to help deliver solutions to our customers. Minerva's primary strength is the ability to display raster and vector data together, from multiple sources, on a planetary scale, with the benefit of high-performance computer graphics. This mix of features facilitates real-time, geospatial data exploration in a multi-screen, Virtual Reality environment.


A recent project at Decision Theater with the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) put Minerva to the test -- and it passed with flying colors. Tim Lant, Decision Theater's Modeling and Simulation group leader and SUSD project lead, developed enrollment projections for the various schools within the district. These projections (developed with PowerSim) filled three walls and Minerva got the other four.

• Browse gallery of images made by Minerva, as well as photographs during the SUSD school board meeting at Decision Theater on 10-Apr-2007

Over Afghanistan

Decison Theater can now show satellite images of Afghanistan draped over NASA SRTM terrain using OSSIM-Planet, OpenSceneGraph, and VR Juggler.


OSSIM-Planet does a great job of detail management; when you get close, then and only then does it go for the detailed terrain and high-resolution images.

• Browse gallery of additional Afghanistan images and movies from Decision Theater

Mars Up Close

Aashish Chaudhary and Adam Kubach continue to push the envelope of what's possible at ASU's Decision Theater. Using OSSIM Planet as a foundation, they were able to load images from the Mars Global Data Sets. Shown below is the THEMIS Day IR Global Mosaic image set.


At the base of the software stack is Open Scene Graph and VR Juggler; both have proven to be very flexible visualization toolkits. Decision Theater's seven rear-projected screens powered by a 64-bit, high-end Linux cluster make the visualization highly effective.

Downloads:

• Browse gallery of additional Mars images made with OSSIM

Seven Screens of Mother Earth

Yesterday was a big leap forward for Decision Theater technology. Adam Kubach and Aashish Chaudhary were able to combine ossimPlanet with VR-Juggler to get Earth on all seven screens.


Since ossimPlanet uses OpenSceneGraph to draw, integrating with our existing code-base should be straightforward. Thus, it is likely to become the "platform" on which we build most of our future immersive applications. This includes regional development projects as well as scientific and engineering visualizations that have a geo-spatial component.

Downloads:

• Browse gallery of Earth images
  

Interaction between Turbulence Structures and Suspended Sediment in Rivers

This work actually pre-dates the SERV initiative, but it's a perfect fit for the mission. Mark Schmeeckle and his graduate student, Ryosuke Akahori, are working with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center to determine how to prevent sandbars in the Colorado River from washing away. Shown below is a screen capture of their simulation of sand particle motion.


Aashish Chaudhary (Lead Programmer) of Decision Theater lead this visualization effort. Other contributors were Jessica Block (Research Scientist) and Perry Miller (Assistant Director). A detailed discussion of the research can be found here.

Downloads:

• Browse gallery of related images and movies
  
• 18 x 24 inch PDF poster (4 MB)
  

Decision Theater

Each individual SERV project will be a collaboration between the ASU faculty member(s) who won the award and Decision Theater's scientific visualization experts. If there is a high-performance computing component then the Fulton High Performance Computing group will be engaged as well.

Motivation for SERV

While research in the domain of scientific visualization is well represented at Arizona State University through the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling (PRISM), many research efforts in other domains would greatly benefit from state of the practice scientific visualization. This second category – leveraging existing scientific visualization techniques – is much more difficult to fund through outside sources, precisely because it does not advance the art of computer graphics. However, when applied appropriately and effectively, these standard techniques can add value to existing research programs.

In general, scientific visualization can help research efforts in three ways: 1) validating an algorithm or process under development, 2) yielding insight into a data set or experimental sample, and 3) communicating results through compelling images and animations. This last item, outreach, will foster interdisciplinary research by communicating – with a picture – the essence of each researcher’s results to other ASU colleagues.