Pasquale Herzig, Michael Englert, Sebastian Wagner, Yvonne Jung & Ulrich Bockholt...

Pasquale Herzig, Michael Englert, Sebastian Wagner, Yvonne Jung & Ulrich Bockholt

pasquale.herzig@igd.fraunhofer.de

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.

• pasquale.herzig@igd.fraunhofer.de• http://www.earthserver.eu

• Questions?• More technical details in the paper.