Development of a real-time solution for an interactive VR representation of large star catalogues
Paolo Gallo
Development of a real-time solution for an interactive VR representation of large star catalogues.
Rel. Andrea Sanna, Eugenio Topa. Politecnico di Torino, Corso di laurea magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica (Computer Engineering), 2021
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Abstract
This thesis takes place in the context of Virtual Reality and Data Visualization techniques applied to large astronomical datasets. The goal of this work is to improve and extend the already existing Astra Data Navigator application, built with the Unity game engine, and make it capable of loading and displaying large star catalogues in a realistic and real-time 3D environment. The software was built in the VR laboratory of ALTEC - Aerospace Logistics Technology Engineering Company - while interfacing with other European projects such as NEANIAS and ESA’s Gaia mission, which is particularly relevant to this work. The catalogue of celestial objects observed by the Gaia astrometric satellite is the largest collection of stars available to date, counting over 1.8 billion entries; being able to navigate and interact with this data in 3D would be extremely useful for both scientific and educational purposes, but most VR tools are limited to a much smaller object count and cannot be extended further.
On the data management side, the application (which has an integrated star catalogue but also supports external data sources in the form of CSV files or SQL databases) offers the choice between two different modes: the user can choose to load all of the available data at startup and store it in the system memory, which requires more resources and increased loading time but then provides a seamless navigation of the 3D environment, or he can opt for a dynamic loading solution (better suited for large catalogues), that only selects relevant data based on the current observer position, saving a lot of resources but introducing additional loading times that interrupt the navigation experience
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