Cosmology of the early universe viewed through the new infrastructure
Communications of the ACM
A framework for assisted exploration with collaboration
VIS '99 Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99: celebrating ten years
A physically-based night sky model
Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
The SDSS skyserver: public access to the sloan digital sky server data
Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Volume-rendered galactic animations
Communications of the ACM
Rendering the first star in the universe: a case study
Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '02
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Simulating the Aurora Borealis
PG '00 Proceedings of the 8th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications
Modeling Supernovae: Braving a Bold New Frontier
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Hierarchical Splatting of Scattered 4D Data
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Scalable WIM: Effective Exploration in Large-scale Astrophysical Environments
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Visualizing Large-Scale Uncertainty in Astrophysical Data
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Multi-touch techniques for exploring large-scale 3D astrophysical simulations
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Visualization for the Physical Sciences
Computer Graphics Forum
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Modern astronomical instruments produce enormous amounts of three-dimensional data describing the physical Universe. The currently available data sets range from the solar system to nearby stars and portions of the Milky Way Galaxy, including the interstellar medium and some extrasolar planets, and extend out to include galaxies billions of light years away. Because of its gigantic scale and the fact that it is dominated by empty space, modeling and rendering the Universe is very different from modeling and rendering ordinary three-dimensional virtual worlds at human scales. Our purpose is to introduce a comprehensive approach to an architecture solving this visualization problem that encompasses the entire Universe while seeking to be as scale-neutral as possible. One key element is the representation of model-rendering procedures using power scaled coordinates (PSC), along with various PSC-based techniques that we have devised to generalize and optimize the conventional graphics framework to the scale domains of astronomical visualization. Employing this architecture, we have developed an assortment of scale-independent modeling and rendering methods for a large variety of astronomical models, and have demonstrated scale-insensitive interactive visualizations of the physical Universe covering scales ranging from human scale to the Earth, to the solar system, to the Milky Way Galaxy, and to the entire observable Universe.