VR Visualisation as an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Data Exploration Tool for Large Eddy Simulations of Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions

  • Gil Bohrer
  • Marcos Longo
  • David J. Zielinski
  • Rachael Brady
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5358)

Abstract

Scientific research has become increasingly interdisciplinary, and clear communication is fundamental when bringing together specialists from different areas of knowledge. This work aims at discussing the role of fully immersive virtual reality experience to facilitate interdisciplinary communication by utilising the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE), a CAVE-like system, to explore the complex and high-resolution results from the Regional Atmospheric Modelling System-based Forest Large-Eddy Simulation (RAFLES) model coupled with the Ecosystem Demography model (ED2). VR exploration provided an intuitive environment to simultaneously analyse canopy structure and atmospheric turbulence and fluxes, attracting and engaging specialists from various backgrounds during the early stages of the data analysis. The VR environment facilitated exploration of large multivariate data with complex and not fully understood non-linear interactions in an intuitive and interactive way. This proved fundamental to formulate hypotheses about tree-scale atmosphere-canopy-structure interactions and define the most meaningful ways to display the results.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  • Gil Bohrer
    • 1
  • Marcos Longo
    • 2
  • David J. Zielinski
    • 3
  • Rachael Brady
    • 3
  1. 1.department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic ScienceOhio State UniversityColumbus
  2. 2.Department of Earth and Planetary SciencesHarvard UniversityCambridge
  3. 3.Visualization Technology GroupDuke University

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