Inspiration
After the opening ceremony, we saw that both JPL and Microsoft had come with awesome tools to show us. The idea formed as a way to mesh these; essentially, somehow visualize the data from JPL on the Microsoft Hololens. Orginally, we wanted to do a starmap, but it eventually turned into the way cooler "gravity visualization" that it is now.
What it does
We wanted to create that "fabric of spacetime" effect that is commonly used in science documentaries, only with some added functionality like walking around or hand-dragging. We eventually tried two different ways of visualization; grid based and point based. Check out the screenshots above!
Challenges
Our biggest problem was hardware limitation. Obviously, there's no 2000 dollar Nvidia graphics card packed into the hololens, but calculating gravity is inherently an O(n) problem, which means theres going to be some serious problems with packing a simulation onto the hololens. We're not calculating gravity exactly, but we still have to calculate its effects at pretty regular intervals. The majority of the effort went to optimizing the visualization.
Future Goals
There's a lot of work to be done. The code is parallelizable, but I don't know how much the Hololens benefits from parallelization. There's also some critical simplifications that should be made to gravity, like calculating quad-tree center of masses to speed the gravity computations. Furthermore, while we ended up hard coding our demos, I would love to see this work with real JPL data, like a galaxy or star map.
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