A showcase of screen captures from some of our past and current projects. You’ll find a variety of projects here: games, simulations and data visualizations. Our older projects were all in Second Life – our newer work is mainly with the Unity game engine. A number of these screenshots were taken during the making of the game, so they may lack polish, especially in the on-screen UI elements. Click an image preview to view it full-size. TerraViz An experiment: Can we use a game engine to visualize scientific data? TerraViz is...
read moreDavey 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 nice write up of the competition in his blog post. (A word of caution: the download link...
read moreWhat’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 with 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 Unity3D for serious data visualizations. The result is TerraViz. TerraViz is designed...
read moreRecently 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 version of his data set that comprises around half a million vertices. Visit the cave by...
read moreDeveloped 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!
read moreWelcome 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...
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