Cosmic Explorer: A virtual reality environment for exploring cosmic data

Abstract

Supercomputer simulations now can produce multilevel, multi-scale large data sets that require new techniques in scientific visualization and higher levels of hardware performance. The authors explore the use virtual reality (VR) technology in this connection. Cosmic Explorer is a VR environment visualizing numerical and observational cosmology data. They have implemented multi-scale visualization techniques that will work on large, multilevel time-dependent data sets. VR provides natural ways to navigate in an immersive environment, and scientific visualization requires overviewing. The techniques bridge the two in a VR system involving the BOOM and the DataGlove. Combining modern visualization hardware, software, and VR technology, the authors are able to create a system that lets users explore the virtual space created by numerical simulations with ease and naturalness.<>