Using Oculus as a visualization tool for stellar astrophysics applications
Hey guys, I'm currently working on a project involving reading in smoothed particle data from 3D simulations of various binary star systems. My goal is to provide an immersive and new way to observe these systems up close for the first time, well, ever. If it works, it would be a great tool to have in any astro lab as a way to really visualize what is happening way out there in space. I guess this post is basically about viability; would it work to read in values from our SPH code and use them to assign, say, color and brightness values to regions on the stars so it would look like we are flying around among them? For starters, we'd like to be able to do something like the following.
Is
this feasible with ~100,000 particles or am I crazy to hope that it
will work? If so, is there a better engine than Unity3D (or Unreal
Engine 4) for our application? I guess it would depend on which one is more efficient at rendering a lot of particles, or maybe some custom rendering work might need to be done. Thanks for any input I might get back, I'd like to see this project work out.
1) Read in x, y, z, radius, and color data for about 100,000 particles at many different times t.
2)
Have the user fly around and through the data at a fixed time t, with
particle positions determined by x, y, and z, and with the size and
color of each particle determined by its individual radius and color
values.
Have the user fly around and through the data at a fixed time t, with
particle positions determined by x, y, and z, and with the size and
color of each particle determined by its individual radius and color
values.
3) Have the user observe the data as time t advances.
this feasible with ~100,000 particles or am I crazy to hope that it
will work? If so, is there a better engine than Unity3D (or Unreal
Engine 4) for our application? I guess it would depend on which one is more efficient at rendering a lot of particles, or maybe some custom rendering work might need to be done. Thanks for any input I might get back, I'd like to see this project work out.