KeckCAVES On Mars, pt. Oh-I-lost-count

Last weekend, we had yet another professional film crew visiting us to shoot video about our involvement in NASA’s still on-going Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, aka Curiosity rover) mission. This time, they were here to film parts of an upcoming 90-minute special about Mars exploration for the National Geographic TV channel. Like last time, the “star” of the show was Dawn Sumner, faculty in the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, one of the founding members of KeckCAVES, and member of the MSL science team.

Unlike last time, we did not film in the KeckCAVES facility itself (due to the demise of our CAVE), but in the UC Davis ModLab. ModLab is part of an entirely different unit — UC Davis’s Digital Humanities initiative — but we are working closely with them on VR development, they have a nice VR environment consisting of two HTC Vive headsets and a large 4.2m x 2.4m screen with a ceiling-mounted ultra-short throw projector (see Figure 1), their VR hardware is running our VR software, and they were kind enough to let us use their space.

Figure 1: Preparation for filming in UC Davis’s ModLab, showing its 4.2m x 2.4m front-projected screen and ceiling-mounted ultra-short throw projector, and two Lighthouse base stations.

The fundamental idea here was to use several 3D models, created or reconstructed from real data sent back either by satellites orbiting Mars or by the Curiosity rover itself, as backdrops to let Dawn talk about the goals and results of the MSL mission, and her personal involvement in it. Figure 1 shows a backdrop in the real sense of the word, i.e., a 2D picture (a photo taken by Curiosity’s mast camera) with someone standing in front of it, but that was not the idea here (we didn’t end up using that photo). Instead, Dawn was talking while wearing a VR headset and interacting with the 3D models she was talking about, with a secondary view of the virtual world, from the point of view of the film camera, shown on the big screen behind her. More on that later. Continue reading

Archaeologists use LiDAR to find lost cities in Honduras

I wasn’t able to talk about this before, but now I guess the cat’s out of the bag. About two years ago, we helped a team of archaeologists and filmmakers to visualize a very large high-resolution aerial LiDAR scan of a chunk of dense Honduran rain forest in the CAVE. Early analyses of the scan had found evidence of ruins hidden under the foliage, and using LiDAR Viewer in the CAVE, we were able to get a closer look. The team recently mounted an expedition, and found untouched remains of not one, but two lost cities in the jungle. Read more about it at National Geographic and The Guardian. I want to say something cool and Indiana Jones-like right now, but I won’t.

Figure 1: A “were-jaguar” effigy, likely representing a combination of a human and spirit animal, is part of a still-buried ceremonial seat, or metate, one of many artifacts discovered in a cache in ruins deep in the Honduran jungle.
Photograph by Dave Yoder, National Geographic. Full-resolution image at National Geographic.

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I Can’t Ever Get Over This Mars Thing, Can I?

I have talked about KeckCAVES’ involvement in the Curiosity Mars Rover missions several times before, but I just found a set of cool pictures that I have not shared yet. I just saw a reddit thread about a VR application to walk on the moon, one commenter asked about doing the same for Mars, and one thing led to another.

Can an application like that be done for Mars? Do we have enough data, and are the data publicly available? The answers are “yes, already done,” “kinda,” and “yes, but,” respectively.

As of my last checking, there are two main sources of topography data for Mars. The older source is an orbital laser range survey done by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). This is essentially a planetary LiDAR scan, and can be visualized using LiDAR Viewer. The two pictures I mention above are these (Figures 1 and 2):

Figure 1: Global visualization of Mars topography using the MOLA data set, rendered using LiDAR Viewer. Vertical scale is 5:1.

Figure 2: Close-up of global Mars topography data set (centered on the canals), showing individual laser returns as grey dots. The scan lines corresponding to individual orbital periods can clearly be identified. Vertical scale is 5:1.

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2D Desktop Embedding via VNC

There have been several discussions on the Oculus subreddit recently about how to integrate 2D desktops or 2D applications with 3D VR environments; for example, how to check your Facebook status while playing a game in the Oculus Rift without having to take off the headset.

This is just one aspect of the larger issue of integrating 2D and 3D applications, and it reminded me that it was about time to revive the old VR VNC client that Ed Puckett, an external contractor, had developed for the CAVE a long time ago. There have been several important changes in Vrui since the VNC client was written, especially in how Vrui handles text input, which means that a completely rewritten client could use the new Vrui APIs instead of having to implement everything ad-hoc.

Here is a video showing the new VNC client in action, embedded into LiDAR Viewer and displayed in a desktop VR environment using an Oculus Rift HMD, mouse and keyboard, and a Razer Hydra 6-DOF input device:

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KeckCAVES in the News

A cluster of earthquakes always gets the news media interested in geology, at least for a short time, and Monday’s 4.4 in southern California, following last week’s series of north coast quakes up to 6.9, was no different. Our local media’s go-to guy for earthquakes and other natural hazards is Dr. Gerald Bawden of the USGS Sacramento. Gerald also happens to be one of the main users of the KeckCAVES visualization facility and KeckCAVES software, and so he took an interview with our local Fox-affiliate in the CAVE, “to get out of the wind,” as he put it.

Here’s the video. Caution: ads after the jump.

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When the novelty is gone…

I just found this old photo on one of my cameras, and it’s too good not to share. It shows former master’s student Peter Gold (now in the PhD program at UT Austin) working with a high-resolution aerial LiDAR scan of the El Mayor-Cucapah fault rupture after the April 2010 earthquake (here is the full-resolution picture, for the curious).

Figure 1: Former master’s student Peter Gold in the CAVE, analyzing a high-resolution aerial LiDAR scan of the El Mayor-Cucapah fault rupture.

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Meet the LiDAR Viewer

I’ve recently realized that I should urgently write about LiDAR Viewer, a Vrui-based interactive visualization application for massive-scale LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, essentially 3D laser scanning writ large) data.

Figure 1: Photo of a user viewing, and extracting features from, an aerial LiDAR scan of the Cosumnes River area in central California in a CAVE.

I’ve also realized, after going to the ILMF ’13 meeting, that I need to make a new video about LiDAR Viewer, demonstrating the rendering capabilities of the current and upcoming versions. This occurred to me when the movie I showed during my talk had a copyright notice from 2006(!) on it.

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Immersive visualization for archaeological site preservation

Have I mentioned lately that VR is not dead yet, and instead thinks it’ll be going for a walk? Here’s more proof. One of KeckCAVES‘ external users, Marshall Millett, archaeologist and GIS expert, is using high-resolution 3D scanning, based on LiDAR or white-light scanning, to capture and digitally preserve cultural heritage sites, such as the Maidu Indian Museum’s historic site and trail (close to Roseville, CA).

Figure 1: Danny Rey, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, and Marcos Guerrero, Cultural Resources Manager, representatives of the United Auburn Indian Community, viewing a high-resolution 3D scan of the Maidu Historic Trail and Site in the KeckCAVES immersive visualization facility. In the background Joe Dumit of UC Davis’ Science and Technology Studies, and myself. Photo provided by Marshall Millett.

Marshall has been using KeckCAVES software, particularly LiDAR Viewer (about which I should really write a post), and also the KeckCAVES facility itself and related technology, to visualize his high-resolution 3D models at 1:1 scale, and with the ability to experience them in ways that are not normally possible (most of these sites are fragile and/or sacred, and not available to the public). Part of this work were several visits of community representatives to the KeckCAVES facility, to view their digitally reconstructed historic site (see Figure 1).

Marshall presented a poster about his work at last year’s 3D Digital Documentation Summit, held July 10-12, 2012 at the Presidio, San Fransisco, CA, and was just interviewed for a podcast by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (where, as of 02/21/2013, KeckCAVES prominently features on the front page).

On the road for VR (sort of…): ILMF ’13, Denver, CO

I just returned from the 2013 International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF ’13), where I gave a talk about LiDAR Viewer (which I haven’t previously written about here, but I really should). ILMF is primarily an event for industry exhibitors and LiDAR users from government agencies or private companies to meet. I only saw one other person from the academic LiDAR community there, and my talk stuck out like a sore thumb, too (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Snapshot from towards the end of my talk at ILMF ’13, kindly provided by Marshall Millett. My talk was a bit off-topic for the rest of the conference, and at 8:30 in the morning, hopefully explaining the sparse audience.

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