NASA Web WorldWind Multidimension Visualization Tool GSoC 2016

Introduction

The idea behind this project is to create an application using Nasa Web World Wind to show metadata about environmental variables in more than three dimensions. The model I'd like to implement to present 3D data is a Voxel model. Each voxel has three dimensions that will be possible to customize with the interested metadata, but also more information can be shown thanks to Web World Wind capabilities. Coloring each Voxel might present another metadata and additionally creating an animation in time gives the opportunity to introduce a further variable. Users will be able to interact with the visualization, customizing the metadata on the Voxel and filtering data according to specific settings. As input data, I am considering telecommunication data from "Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge 2015". My idea is to create first the visualization environment and further import the data in a database to allow users to query the database for particular data. Moreover, depending on the time also would be interesting to allow users to import their data set in a specific format to share the view on a specific globe with other people.

Schedule

Timeline	TODO	Status
23 - 31 May 2016	Voxel model implementation in Nasa WebWorldWind.	Done
1 – 10 June 2016	Sample grid and data importing	Done
11 - 17 June 2016	Sample visualization on voxel Multi dimensions on a single voxel	---
18 – 25 June 2016	Matching voxels with real data. Creating the first filtering functionalities	---
26 June - 2 July 2016	Advanced filtering functionalities	---
3 - 17 July 2016	Time slider (4th dimension) implementation.	---
18 – 31 July 2016	Sample database implementation	---
1 – 15 August 2016	Importing of diverse datasets.	---
16 – 23 August 2016	User interface implementation Testing and documentation	---

We will try to follow the schedule and report the status of the project each week.

State of the art before this project

Currently, there are no 4D visualization tools using voxel models relying on pure javascript application like Nasa Web World Wind, although some examples are available for other platforms.

Additions that this project will bring to the software

With the application I will create, many users would be able to reuse the code adapting it to other projects for their needs. Since the application consists in many subparts, many demos can be created to be shown the usage of some tools on the Web World Wind Examples page in the website.

Student's Biography

I am currently a student in the M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. I am interested in the Information Technology field applied to the geomatic and environmental one. Besides the GSoC, I am helping the team of NASA Web WorldWind, along with ESA and Thales to test and develop the Web WorldWind framework.