Switzerland presents virtual reality software of the universe – The Denver Post
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The last border rarely seemed so close – at least virtually.
Researchers at one of Switzerland’s leading universities released open source beta software this month that enables virtual visits through the cosmos, including to the International Space Station, past the moon, Saturn or exoplanets, over galaxies and far beyond.
The program – called the Virtual Reality Universe Project or VIRUP – summarizes what the researchers call the largest data set in the universe to create three-dimensional panoramic visualizations of space.
Software engineers, astrophysicists and experimental museology experts from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have teamed up to put together the virtual map that can be viewed through individual VR equipment, immersion systems such as panorama cinema with 3D glasses, planetarium-like dome- Screens or simply on a PC for two-dimensional display.
“The novelty of this project was to bring all the available data sets together in one frame, when you can see the universe in different scales – near us, around the earth, around the solar system, at the plane of the Milky Way, to see through the universe . “And the time to the beginning – what we call the Big Bang,” said Jean-Paul Kneib, Director of the EPFL’s Astrophysics Laboratory.
Think of a kind of Google Earth – but for the universe. Computer algorithms produce terabytes of data and create images that can appear up to a meter or almost infinitely away – as if you were sitting back and looking at the entire observable universe.
VIRUP is accessible to everyone free of charge – but requires at least one computer and is best visualized with VR devices or 3D functions. It aims to attract a wide range of visitors, both scientists who want to visualize the data they keep collecting, and a wide audience who want to explore the sky virtually.
Work in progress, the beta version does not currently run on a Mac computer. Downloading the software and content can seem a chore for the least experienced computer users, and storage space – on a computer – matters. The wider version of the content is a scaled down version that can be quantified in gigabytes, a kind of best of highlights. Astronomy fans with more PC memory might choose to download more.
The project collects information from eight databases that include at least 4,500 known exoplanets, tens of millions of galaxies, hundreds of millions of space objects in total, and more than 1.5 billion light sources from the Milky Way alone. But when it comes to potential data, the sky is literally the limit: future databases could contain asteroids in our solar system or objects like nebulae and pulsars further down the galaxy.
VR games and displays already exist: cosmos-looking apps on tablets enable the night sky to be mapped with zoom-in close-ups of celestial bodies; Software like SpaceEngine from Russia offers universe visuals; NASA has created some smaller VR areas of space.
However, the EPFL team says VIRUP goes much further and broader: data comes from sources such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in the United States and the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to map the Milky Way and their Planck mission to observe the first Light of the Universe, all in one one-stop shop for the most extensive data sets ever.
And there’s more to come: when the 14-country telescope project called the Square Kilometer Array begins pulling information, the data could be counted in petabytes – that’s 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes.
Buckle up your VR glasses and it’s a trippy feeling to see the moon – seemingly the size of a giant beach ball and close enough to hold it – as the horizon moves from the sunny side to the dark side of the moon’s surface turns.
Then speed beyond the solar system and swing past Saturn, then over the Milky Way, swirling and flashing and lifting – with exoplanets highlighted in red. And much further out, you can imagine floating through tiny points of light that represent galaxies, as if the viewer were an unimaginably large giant floating in space.
“It’s a very efficient way to visit all of the different scales that make up our universe, and it’s completely unique,” said Yves Revaz, an EPFL astrophysicist. “A very important part of this project is that it is a first step towards handling much larger data sets that are to come.”
Whole galaxies seem to be strung together by strands or filaments of light, almost like a representation of neural connections that, like galaxies, connect clusters of light. For one of the greatest images of all, there’s a colorful visualization of the cosmic microwave background – the radiation left behind by the Big Bang.
“We actually started this project because I was working on a three-dimensional mapping project of the universe and was always a little frustrated by the 2D visualization on my screen, which wasn’t very meaningful,” said Kneib in an inconspicuous laboratory building that had a panoramic screen , a semi-dome cinema with bean bags and a hard floor area for virtual reality excursions.
“It is true that by showing the universe in 3D, by showing these filaments, by showing these clusters of galaxies that represent large concentrations of matter, you really know what the universe is,” he added.