Driving a virtual submarine

Driving a virtual submarine through an active hydrothermal vent site on the ocean floor: Exploring NOAA seafloor data over the Internet - NGI/NW/04

Bob Embley, PMEL

HPCC Project Review Meeting, Norman, Oklahoma, 24-25 May 2000

There have been some unfortunate but unavoidable delays Funds arrived 3 months later than we expected The lead developer (at Stanford) changed jobs It took a long time to complete the

PMEL/Stanford contract Then the contractor had difficulties in hiring staff Therefore, the project is behind schedule

However, now that the project is underway, progress has been excellent.

StatusDriving a virtual submarine

MilestonesDriving a virtual submarine

Milestone Data Source Status Create the 3-D surface 1-m scale bathymetric grid The full terrain is modelled and imported to

Lightwave3D. We are working on breaking the model into 6 sections to facilitate rendering, texturing, and surfacing.

Create texture maps Field notes, video, photography Texture mapping is in progress. We have a good but small collection of still photos and are working on mosaicking video sequences to provide larger texture maps

Create 3-D models of fauna and geological structures (chimneys, fresh lava flows, faults)

Based on video imagery, photography, and hand samples

Not much progress here. I have finally got a competent student moving forward in this area.

Layout the complete scene

Field observations Not started

Render the nodes and tweens

Computer model Not started

Make QTVR and initial web pages

Computer model Not started

Select and digitize video clips

Field Data Have a good, broad collection of video, selected and digitized, need to do some editing, and compressing for web delivery

Compile other data for GIS

Geology, Chemistry, Biology Beginnning to piece together these pieces.

Building web pages to guide visitor thru site and data

Not started

Quick time movie… Alvin submarine “flying” around a 3D hydrothermal

vent on the sea floor fly-through of a 3-D terrain that is based on a real hydrothermal vent site on the East

Pacific Rise. The terrain is from high-resolution bathymetry, then it is draped with a "texture map" that is based on video and photographs for the bottom, and finally additional 3-D objects like black smoker chimneys and tube worms are added in. This 3-D environment is then used as the basis of an interactive program that lets users move from site to site as if they were in the Alvin submersible. There are hot-links embedded in the environment which link to real video and photographs of specific features of interest. This project is focused on a different area: the NeMO Observatory and the recent eruption at Axial Volcano on the Juan de Fuca Ridge

http://newport.pmel.noaa.gov/~chadwick/alvinSnd3.mov

Quick time virtual reality (QTVR) of a sea floor scene near a vent… Zoom in and out, turn through 360 degrees

http://www.geol.ucsb.edu/~weiland/epr_qtvr.html

Example resultsDriving a virtual submarine

Quick time movieScreen snapshot

http://newport.pmel.noaa.gov/~chadwick/alvinSnd3.mov