Edward Angel wrote: > Look at Donna Cox’s site at > NCSA http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/who-we-are/team/donna-cox-director > > She’s been doing tornado simulations for over 15 years. We worked with > her to put the simulation in planetarium dome. It’s much more > impressive when you put the viewer in the middle of the tornado and > immersed in it in the planetarium.
Or viewing it inside a 3+sided CAVE with Stereo and head tracking! It was also (all) a lot more impressive when it was new... it was a significant early example of marrying fairly serious data/model Viz and high-quality (at that time) rendering for proper 3D spaces. That said, I think this is a worthwhile discussion... though it is one I've been involved in (on both sides of the presumed contention) for decades ( think the term Scientific Visualization was coined in the mid/late 80s?) with limited resolution. One person's eye-candy is anothers' significant "aid to intuition/perception/analysis". Somewhere in between are shades of this with "communication graphics" falling closer to "eye-candy" and highly technical diagrams, charts and graphs aiding in detailed analysis on the other end. In the middle (though I don't really believe it is a single dimensional spectrum) are techniques and renderings which are more useful for things like getting peers up to speed quickly (also communication but more demanding), to gaining novel (or quick) insight into obscured mechanisms, or simply conveniences of/for construction like Gnomonic map projections for navigational charts (so that great circle routes render as straight lines). When Hollywood first discovered computer graphics (or when it embraced it fully by taking over the lion's share of the SIGGRAPH conferences) it lead to a disservice to it's highly effective use in Eng/Sci. I have nothing against high fidelity gaming/FX, it is tres-cool to drop in to the alternate realities of Tron or Lawnmower Man or Virtuosity or Battlezone or Riven or Myst or Toy Story (and infinity and beyond! 25-40 years stale here) but the magic of getting past the uncanny valley is more of a "technical trick" than anything fundamental leading toward better understanding of "life the universe and everything". mumble, - Steve .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
