DIVA Gemstone (UMD)
Projects | | Links: Thesis | Slides | Presentation
As part of the University of Maryland Gemstone Honors program, an interdisciplinary undergraduate team consisting of I and six other students researched novel climate visualizations using virtual reality under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen Penny. The project is titled Data Imaging and Visualization Analysis.
The Gemstone program of the University of Maryland is a division of the Honors program that focuses on research and thesis writing. It is a 4-year program, with teams being created at the end of freshman year on student and professor-created projects, culminating in Thesis defense in the spring of senior year. Each team has a mentor to guide the students throughout the research process.
The project my team and I focused was regarding the state of climate visualization tools used by climate scientists. They are largely outdated and unintuitive to use. Performing targeted analyses on specific climate topics can be time-consuming and fairly shallow. To combat this, Dr. Stephen Penny (our mentor) proposed using virtual reality to produce climate visualizations.
Using an Oculus Rift as our main testing device, we were able to build visualizations of temperature recordings and wind currents across the globe, along with a proof-of-concept local visualization of the Chesapeake Bay. The local visualizations can be used to analysis different climate patterns after major events, for example, with Hurricane Harvey.
We also utilized a Leap Motion infrared sensor, which projects the user hands into the VR space. This adds intuitive user interaction to the tool, through mapping simple gestures to functionalities. For example, one can close a fist to open a menu to control globe rotations.
We also performed some focus groups of get current Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies individuals to get feedback on the tool. The result was the implementation of a zoom feature on the local visualizations.
This was a large collaborative effort between me and the other team members: Teddy Corrales, Erin Estes, Kevin Ho, Austin Hom, Justin Shen, and Justin Pan. Huge thanks to Dr. Stephen Penny for mentoring and guiding us throughout the whole process, as well as the Gemstone Honors program for setting up and the infrastructure for this research effort. Please see the links above for our final thesis paper, the presentation slides, and the presentation recording itself.
We were awarded the James. A Wallace Outstanding Thesis Award for our thesis!
