AGU 2002 Report

by Rob Newman
12/11/2002

3-D datasets on the Geowall attracted students and researchers alike

The arrival of the SIO Geowall caused quite a sensation at this years AGU in San Francisco. The wall, located at the IGPP/GRD booth, was extremely popular with academics and students alike, where visitors donned 3-D glasses and explored various geoscience datasets. The IRIS booth also housed a Geowall, so people could wander between booths seeing different visualizations.

Popular applications and datasets were Ken Chin's Wallview showing Sandwell and Smith's ETOPO2 satellite bathymetry dataset and EVL's Immersaview showing seismic datasets.

Many researchers requested the development of visualizations that could be exported to various formats including Quicktime movies, VRML objects, and iView3D files. A highlight was SIO's Dave Sandwell visiting the booth and seeing his dataset visualized in this manner for the first time. EVL's Walkabout application also proved popular, with visitors exploring virtual Yucca Mountain and La Jolla Shores here in San Diego.

The USGS' Geoff Phelps and EVL's Atul Nayak discussing Wiggleview.

Another popular series of visualizations were field photographs in 3-D (especially the ones from the recent IRIS fieldtrip to Hawai'i) and Steve Reynolds field maps superimposed on DEM's.

IVS's free visualization viewer (iView 3D) was loaded up with Scripps researcher Graham Kent's bathymetry and seismic section data from a recent research cruise, and proved to be a great hit.

On the final day of the conference we managed to get a beta-version of Atul Nayak's Wiggleview application up and running, which proved extremely popular with seismologists who were roaming the conference and came across a 3D globe showing realtime waveform propagation of the 1999 Turkey earthquake!

Another interesting development was the meeting of software developers from IVS (the makers of Fledermaus - the software used extensviely in the SIO Viz Center) and software developers from EVL. Hopefully a consequence of this meeting will be the development of 3-D passive stereo output from Fledermaus, allowing use of this powerful application on the Geowall. Fledermaus is available for Windows XP, but has yet to be developed to run in passive stereo on the Geowall system. More when we hear about it...

Thanks are extended to Paul Morin of the University of Minnesota and Brian Davis from the USGS/EROS Data Center in North Dakota for developing the image files for Wallview. Also a big thank you to all the researchers and students who stopped by to see and comment on the SIO Geowall. Your feedback and requests were greatly appreciated!

SIO's Rob Newman running the SIO Geowall at the IGPP/GRD booth.