Traditional barriers for rich information visualization are crumbling weekly. The latest was noted in a short article on the Scientific American website about “Seeing the Big (and Small) Picture“. The article highlighted the research group called GigaPan Time Machine at Carnegie Mellon, leaded by Illah Nourbakhsh and Randy Sargent. Go to About and watch the second video (7:04) for a quick intro. A recent conference paper describes the approach of GigaPan. Here is a quote from their website:
The idea behind GigaPan is simple. Take a lot of high-resolution images over time and post to a website. However, the engineering and interface is amazing! Think 2D version of Google Earth, zooming across levels of detail, with a flexible time scale, plus the ability to create “tours” across any segment of space and time. …YES! You gotta play with this!
The main page at GigaPan shows more than a dozen amazing examples. Note you need to use Chrome or Safari browsers because of advanced HTML5 features. Firefox will be enabled in December 2011.
- Solar Dynamics Observatory: shows filament eruptions and coronal loops of recent solar flares. Images were taken over a 24-hour period in December 2010, at 24 seconds apart, which is a 600x speedup. Makes you appreciate just how unearthly the surface of the sun really is!
- Plant Growth: 32-day time elapse images at 15-minute intervals. Normally this would be as exciting as “watching grass grow”; however, the plants take on this weird dancing behavior with which we are totally unaware. Note the devastation wroth by the caterpillars!
- Early Universe: a massive cosmology simulation showing the formation of galaxies and black holes by the clumping of filaments of dark matter. Since anyone can see a galaxy forming, instead watch the time warp of intergalactic voids.
- Visible Human Female: We all have seen images of the sectioning of human cadavers, but take one of tours that travels through the human body! Note that the time dimension is NOT time, but the vertical dimension of the human body. So, this is a 2D representation of a 3D object. Think of other possibilities…
- NOAA Weather Radar: Remember when the southeast got hammered by tornadoes over a one-week period in April of 2011? Well, relive that tragic weather pattern by playing with GigaPan.
So what? This is a good example of tools for exploring a huge amount of visual data, simply and easily. Further, it is done with a social capability to share insights into this data. The About page also contains a longer video that lasts about an hour. Toward the end (at 45:00) is a discussion of future directions for the GigaPan research. Very insightful into the potential of this approach for science discovery and education. Further, there is a potential for 3D enhancement using the TeraViz approach from Fragile Earth Studios.
