Virtual Universe

[chris]

Wired has an article about the Hayden Planetarium's Virtual Universe tour:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, ... 51,00.html

It looks pretty neat, however:

One huge problem, however, is traveling smoothly from small objects, like Saturn's moon Titan, to galactic clusters. Right now, collections of data on those vastly different scales are nested one within the other, like Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, with no way to blend them seamlessly. Transitioning from a relatively local scale within the galaxy to a larger scope is currently accomplished with a jump-cut, with a black dome pause between views.

Yes, that sounds like an insoluble problem

--Chris

[PhillipT]

looks like a nice app in deed.

thought the idea of being able to visualise the sphere of Earth's radio signals was a nice touch .... (mmm wonder how to do that in Celestia )

I wonder if they present it ala Robert Zemeckis's opening visualisation sequence complete with sampled soundtrack from Contact...

[selden]

I think the "sphere of radio waves" could be done similarly to the way Celestia currently shows constellation borders as a sphere. Right now, though, that's essentially hard-coded into Celestia. It'd be nice if spherical outlines like that could be created in add-ons. I can think of several other things it could be used for.

Another advantage that Virtual Universe has is that it can show volumetric models like the one they have of the Orion Nebula. Of course, what the article didn't bother to mention is that the Orion Nebula flyby was prescripted and generated on a supercomputer. It isn't done dynamically in realtime. Maybe someday consumer 3D cards will be able to do something similar.