(If you would like to read further material on data visualization and The Global Ozone Distribution project, read
Lloyd Treinish's paper presented at this year's SIGGRAPH.)
What happens when you put supercomputer graphics capabilities in the hands of students from the Cornell Theory Center? The pictures above are part of the answer.
These are stills from animations created by students in instructor Bruce Land's class, CS 418, a course that gives students the opportunity to create high-end graphics using not-so-high-end hardware.
What's so unusual about this work is that it was all created on workstations, using relatively simple-to-use software. As you can see, they are comparable to graphics created on much more powerful machines.
Indeed, these animations were made using a software package called Data Explorer, a point-and-click rendering and animation program that allows users to create images from scientific data fairly easily, using the tools already available to them.
Data Explorer was originally designed to permit researchers to take vast quantities of information and present it in a way that would allow others to interpret it easily. For example, when NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite was measuring the hole in the ozone layer, it was Data Explorer that created 3-D renderings of the depletion from the millions of measurements transmitted daily.
Here are some of those renderings:
(If you would like to read further material on data visualization and The Global Ozone Distribution project, read
But what do less earnest users do with all this image processing power? The students' results range from a fairly serious fly through the solar system to a whimsical showdown between Star Trek and The Death Star.
A total of 23 pieces were created during spring semester for their final class projects. Below is a complete collection of their work for you to view.
Once you've seen them, you'll realize why all the students passed the class with honors.
ŠIBM Corp. 1994
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