This weekend I was back at the Met Office for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2018, and joined the 3D Earthlings team to play with visualisation of data on a 3D representation of the Earth. We were addressing the 1D, 2D, 3D, Go! challenge. I was also considering the Artify the Earth challenge in the same category “Help Others Discover the Earth”, and hopefully the art can come later…
Here’s one of the things we made using Processing and NASA’s dataset of meteorite landings. What we actually submitted was a visualisation of the whole dataset on the surface – kudos to all the guys. This temporary video shows my version of the code visualising incoming meteorites and blasts. The video is created from output from the Processing sketch. Any advice on embedding Processing with Java libraries into a web page would be gratefully received!
We were also working on wrapping videos of eg global cloud cover or carbon dioxide concentrations around the 3D Earth. But half way through the weekend it sadly threw a wobbly, so as of 2 November I’ve only just got it working. Here’s a subset of NASA | A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2… in 3D!
Techie stuff:
- Visualisation created using the Processing programming environment – https://processing.org/
- Peasycam library for moving around Earth – http://mrfeinberg.com/peasycam/
- Other Processing libraries used – java.util.Comparator processing.sound.* processing.video.*
- Frames dumped from Processing turned into video using Movie Maker
Data sources and assumptions for meteorites sketch:
- Earth texture, jpg – https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/earth-cycles
- Meteorite landings, json – https://data.nasa.gov/Space-Science/Meteorite-Landings/gh4g-9sfh
- The radius of the visualised blast is proportional to log(mass of the meteorite)
- The meteorite trajectories are perpendicular to the Earth’s surface