Davey Jackson of Unity, who we had the pleasure of meeting at GameTech last month, has just posted about the 2012 Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge. Unity projects took home a combined $41,000 in prizes, including yours truly with a second place finish in the Holodeck category. Our entry was TerraViz, a 4D (time and space) visualization and collaboration tool. If you haven’t checked it out, we still have the FVWC entry page up here. Eric did a pretty...
What’s the difference between a video game and a data visualization? Quite a bit less than you’d think. In essence, video games are just visualizations – of worlds, of characters, of battles – that are interactive and put to a story. Since we work at NOAA, where literally hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of information are produced daily, we decided to undertake an experiment: to see if we could use a traditional game engine like...
Recently a group from the University of Washington in Saint Louis scanned a 4 km section of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. An interesting article about a project can be found here: http://www.sparllc.com/archiveviewer.php?vol=08&num=14&file=vol08no14-04 The group was able to merge over 130 separate LIDAR scans comprising over 18 million data points to visualize 4 km of the cave. On a whim, we reached out to the principle investigator and he shared a...
Developed in partnership with the Department of Energy this is a recreation of Rock Creek Park outside Washington, DC using the Unity3D game engine, Jibe, and the SmartFox MMO Server. Special thanks goes to Unity3D and their community for providing such great readily available assets!
Welcome to “Virtual Hawaii.” An ongoing project sponsored by NOAA. Not everyone will have a chance to experience the wonders of early celestial navigation on the open ocean, but here, visitors can experience life as it might have been centuries ago in the Hawaiian Islands. You can check out the current stage of development by visiting our web-based version of the game below. A documentary of the version developed in Second Life can been seen...
A mashup of Google Earth and Second Life creating a collaborative 3D data visualization.
Fish for Alaskan King Crab, climb to the top of Mt. McKinley, traverse a glacier, and survive a winter storm on the Bering Sea. All of these are possibilities in the coming world of Virtual Alaska. This project was sponsored by NOAA Fisheries in 2008.
The US Department of Energy, through the direction of the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer, recently started to explore how virtual worlds can improve departmental recruitment and outreach efforts. Individuals who attend virtual recruitment events, and become interested in applying for a job opportunity,have the convenience of immediately viewing the job announcement and completing their application while in the virtual world. ...
Set in the mid 2100s, your mission is to travel back in time and prevent Hurricane Rina in 2017 from destroying an oil rig and causing an environmental disaster. You will act as a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and need to arrive at the rig as soon as possible after the hurricane hits to limit the damage. You must work anonymously — this time period cannot know of the interference from the future. Every game...
Fragile Earth Studios is a project operated within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that leverages data visualizations, simulations, virtual worlds, and games to better understand real-world challenges. We work with a variety of both internal and external customers creating engaging virtual content.
Learn MoreWe’ve created this space so that members of the government and gaming community can meet, exchange ideas, and keep in touch with each other.
We have a number of resources for you:
