Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Monday, 12 February 2018

Explore the Virgo Cluster in VR

Haven't you always wanted to explore the Virgo Cluster in VR ? Of course you have, and now you can ! It's rather crude but it basically works, though it's more of a test than a finished product. There's a bit of flickering in some regions which I don't understand and the galaxies looks weird from certain angles because I'm using the old multiple-billboards trick. I should probably have all the images track the camera instead, but oh well.

Also the resolution is lower than I'd like because headset can't play back anything higher. It's quite fun despite its many deficiencies. At least thanks to YouTube you can still view it in 2D 360, or with anaglyph glasses if you have them.

More info on how the galaxies are rendered available here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-UQjm7equk
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2 comments:

  1. Tim Stoev12 February 2018 at 18:39

    just to get a sense of space and scale, what distances between the galaxies are we talking about?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rhys Taylor12 February 2018 at 18:42

    Tim Stoev Oops ! The whole collection is about 3 million light years across. The size of each galaxy has been exaggerated by a factor of 5.

    ReplyDelete

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