Fu Chi-Wing, Hanson Andrew J
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong.
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2007 Jan-Feb;13(1):108-21. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2007.2.
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.
现代天文仪器会产生大量描述物理宇宙的三维数据。当前可用的数据集涵盖从太阳系到附近恒星以及银河系的部分区域，包括星际介质和一些系外行星，并且向外延伸至数十亿光年外的星系。由于宇宙规模巨大且主要由空旷空间构成，对宇宙进行建模和渲染与在人类尺度上对普通三维虚拟世界进行建模和渲染有很大不同。我们的目的是引入一种全面的方法来构建一种架构，以解决这个可视化问题，该架构涵盖整个宇宙，同时力求尽可能不受尺度限制。一个关键要素是使用幂缩放坐标（PSC）来表示模型渲染过程，以及我们设计的各种基于PSC的技术，以便将传统图形框架推广并优化到天文可视化的尺度域。采用这种架构，我们针对各种天文模型开发了一系列与尺度无关的建模和渲染方法，并展示了对物理宇宙的尺度不敏感的交互式可视化，其涵盖的尺度范围从人类尺度到地球、太阳系、银河系，直至整个可观测宇宙。
