Onyx2 to be used in making 3D atlas of the Milky WayMountain View 26 Apr 99As the centerpiece of the Hayden's 68-foot "virtual dome" Space Theater, the Onyx2 will manipulate massive scientific datasets containing billions of stars - 100,000 times larger than that of any other planetarium. The resulting 3D star map will also include close-ups of individual nebula, modeled from Hubble Telescope images, providing a one-of-a-kind experience for viewers, and further blurring the line between simulation and reality. The Hayden Planetarium's Space Theatre will be housed in the top half of an 87-foot sphere that appears to float inside a glass cube enclosure. When finished in early 2000, it will be the most technologically advanced theater of its kind, and the first in the world to rely on visual supercomputing for image generation on a large scale. The technology has advantages over film projection because data content can be interactively controlled to show changing conditions in the galaxy, and can also be integrated with film and real-time graphics. SGI is supplying the planetarium with a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 visual workstation with seven InfiniteReality2 visualization subsystems. The workstation is a multiple configuration with 28 R12000 300-MHz processors, and has the ability to drive ultra-high-resolution displays. The project has brought together scientists, computer programmers, science visualization artists and video engineers from the museum, NASA, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Aechelon Technology is developing C-Galaxy for the American Museum of Natural History. The software is used to traverse star and astronomical databases in real time. Aechelon's video playback control software permits the merging of fully rendered sequences into the real-time traversal for flexible show programming.
|
|