Over the past year, the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Earth Science Division (ESD) Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) and Navteca have been exploring virtual reality (VR) technology as an approach to improving the understand of natural phenomena and physical processes. Initial demonstrations were made at the AGU conference last year and, working with Code 606, successive improvements to the functionality and depth have been made. Under an Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) contract, Navteca has developed a new VR demonstration of the three-dimensional structure of Hurricane Matthew cloud and storm systems from the Global Precipitation Model (GPM) which was demonstrated in the NASA booths at AGU Fall Meeting 2016 and at Supercomputing 2016.
The observer interacts with and views volumetric data in an innovative way as data is rendered in real time using interactive VR hardware (headset and controllers). The user has the ability to physically move through data that is traditionally displayed as layers or slices.
Results from displaying GPM data show that there is interesting potential for scientific visualization and analysis using VR. We will share these results at our demonstration of GPM data in virtual reality.
