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Pasquale Herzig, Michael Englert, Sebastian Wagner, Yvonne Jung & Ulrich Bockholt
Presented at Web3D 2013
X3D-EarthBrowserVisualize our Earth in your Web Browser
EarthServer
• http://www.earthserver.eu/• Funded by EU e-Infrastructure
– Project Number: 283610
• Open-access, ad-hoc analytics on extreme-size earth science data
• RTD & services, six lighthouse applications
EarthServer
• Different domains of earth science with unique challenges - including visualization
• E.g.: Cryospheric, atmospheric and planetary science, geology and oceanography, etc.
• Potentially looking for very different things to display
EarthServer
• Aim: 100+ TB of raster data each• Server/Client architecture, OGC
standards on top of HTTP as “glue”– WCS,WMS,WCPS– OGC standards development also part of
the project
• Servers designed to deal with big data, clients request manageable subsets
• This talk: focus on 3D web client
Visualizations in X3DOM
• Open Source middleware for declarative 3D on the web -> Tutorials yesterday
• http://www.x3dom.org
Web 3D Client• Aim: display raster data in a 3D
environment on a web page• Raster data comes in many varieties
– 1 to 3 spatial dimensions, optionally combined with a temporal dimension
– uniform and various types of non-uniform grids, general meshes etc.
– multiple coverages (datasets) sometimes necessary for meaningful results
– 1 to n channels of different types– ... and plenty more...
Web 3D Client
• Also may need different visualizations of any coverage type.– Planes– Elevation Maps– Point Clouds– Time Series– Volume rendering– ...
• Plenty of “3D widgets” you could think of
Web 3D Client
• Also, may want to combine different “widgets” in one display
• And that’s just visualization.• There is also interaction• Some basics (like navigation) are
baseline, but how to anticipate all the custom interaction schemes users might want?
Web 3D Client
• Now, what is a 3D web client then?• In the first year, we made a few
prototypes, each addressing a different scenario
• They all have in common that they display something in a 3D box rather than e.g. on a globe– Internally dubbed the “fishtank”
EOX MultiCoverage
PlanetServer WCS/WMS
WCPS Elevation Grid
Unified Client
• Our aim was not to deliver just a bunch of semi-related code solving very specific problems.
• One 3D web client to rule them all.
• On desktops as well as mobile devices.
Unified Client
• Our solution: make client modular and split setup and execution
• Operator gets all the power at source code level to set up the application, may even write custom modules if necessary
Unified Client
• The unified client consists of– a framework with a module API– modules– UI & tools
• E.g. a module that has API to setup WCPS call that will request RGBA image and add it to scene as elevation map
• Framework has composition functionality like transformations and transparency
Unified Client
Underground Radar Data
Side Panels
Operator - Setup Example
User Interface - Using JQueryUI
• Created automatically
• Basics for modules– Movement, scaling,
transparency..
• Settings for light, cameras & annotations
• Easy to change and to adopt
Progressive Data Transmission
• Load low resolution data first
– Increase resolution after a succesfull
query
– Add higher resolution when available
• Quicker feedback for the user
• The protocols allow to choose the
resolution
Video
Summary
• Web client using X3DOM and no plugins– Except IE (X3DOM Flash fallback)
• Easy to set up by operators– Few lines of Javascript code
• Combine data from different sources– Services for e.g. geology and
oceanography
• Combine different visualization types– Elevation map, underground, pointcloud…
What’s Next?
• Performance– Less Javascript, more shader in X3DOM
• User Experience– better UI feedback
• Interaction– e.g. UI for positioning planes and
callbacks into application code to handle change events
• More modules
Thank You!
• Feel free to contact me or the EarthServer community.
• [email protected]• http://www.earthserver.eu
• Questions?• More technical details in the paper.