Bureau of Earth Liaison - Extra-Planetary Affairs
We are using this personal project to explore the possibilities offered by different multimedia formats supported by the main web browers.
The page shown uses a Java applet (PTViewer) to present a 360° panoramic view of a section of a navigable virtual space. The brighter stars in the panorama are active hotspots which can be clicked.
To create the panoramas and the hotspots supporting navigation, a stellar generation model (accrete) was used to populate a database (PostgreSQL) with several hundred stellar systems, each with a location in 3D space and a set of stellar system characteristics.
(The stellar generation model was developed at the Rand Corporation in the 60's as a preliminary exploration of global warming and climate change issues. It assumes an accretion model of star and planet generation which remained contentious until relatively recently, when stellar generation modellers had to acknowledge the implications of the discovery of the existence of planets in other starsystems by observers using the Hubble space telescope.)
The starsystem data was then programmatically manipulated into rendering instructions for a raytracer (Povray) and for each starsystem a panoramic image was rendered showing a 360° view of the virtual space from that starsystem. Further calculation provided 24 hotspots per panorama, each linking to one of the 24 nearest starsystems, affording navigation through the virtual space. A set of palettes was generated (Gimp) for each of the dozen or so defined planetary types (gas giant, desert, greenhouse, etc) and a further manipulation (Python) generated systematic palette variations which were used to create unique images for over 1000 planets.
The presentation shows the destination hotspots of the panorama in a list on either side of the applet. Clicking on a destination animates the panorama, bringing the selected starsystem into the centre of the panorama display. Where planets exist, a thumbnail image of each is shown at the foot of the display.
Users can select to navigate either between systems or between planets within a starsystem. Further work is required to render the planets at the level of detail required to be plausible. In the project's original implementation several years ago, VRML (a text-based 3D modelling language) was used to provide the beginnings of a planetary environment for users to explore interactively. Unfortunately, VRML didn't receive much support from browser vendors and so this part of project remains undeveloped.
However, the W3C (WorldWideWeb Consortium) has taken up VRML's case and reworked it to include principles developed in XML, producing a specification for X3D, the next generation 3D modelling language. Now we're just waiting for a plug-in to be developed which doesn't require a 5GHz triple-processor, 4Terabyte graphics card. We may be waiting for some time - The Bureau of Earth Liaison's Extra-Planetary Affairs website has been running for five years now. Patience is a virtue.
The presentation is currently animated via a Python cgi-bin script which accesses the Postgres database, retrieves the associated data and links in the corresponding graphics and panorama.
This particular presentation is not intended to be the primary means of interacting with the system, it will be a subsidiary interface, pretending to be a shipboard system. For passing interest, some early illustrations from the environment have been appended below. The website is live and is accessible from the home page of the Bureau of Earth Liasion, Extra-Planetary Affairs.
1998 version (Strata Studio) |
2001 version (Cinema 4D) |