Proof of concept : M33 HI data cube in VR.

Proof of concept : M33 HI data cube in VR. Has a lot of little flaws but the basic concept works : you fly through the data, it's visibly 3D, and you get full 360 coverage. Needs a headset to view this one. Once I iron out the problems (data has been smoothed too much, the colour scheme gets rid of too much noise which would provide useful reference points for depth information, and there's probably too much saturation) I'll upload to YouTube with metadata, so you can pan around in a regular web browser.

This one is created using the bare minimum display code of FRELLED (http://www.rhysy.net/frelled-1.html) converted to use Blender's Cycles engine, which can handle the equirectangular camera format needed for 360 spherical stereo video. This has to be rendered rather than using realtime capture (though the Cycles camera supports equirectangular display in the realtime preview, it doesn't seem to allow for capturing preview animations like the OpenGL view does). It also requires having all three projections visible at once, so this is rather slow.

Previously I was hell-bent on getting the ALFALFA data catalogue rendered in VR, but the limitation was that Blender versions 2.78 and below don't allow more than 1,000 image textures. And my work machine, which can comfortably handle intensive processing jobs for days on end without batting an eye, won't let me install 2.79 (which doesn't have a texture limit) unless I do so massive upgrading of my Linux installation. Fortunately, while many HI data cubes have the equivalent of more than 1,000 images, most of them don't need it - in fact, removing most of them actually results in a more detailed, less saturated appearance of the final renders.

More on the data cube on display here.