Virtual Observatory Virtual Reality

The virtual observatory (VO) and its standards have become a success story in providing uniform access to a huge amount of data sets. Those data sets contain correlations, distributions, and relations that have to be unveiled. Visualization has always been a key tool to understand complex structures. Typically high-dimensional information is projected to a two dimensional plane to create a diagnostic plot. Besides expensive stereoscopic visualization cubes, only stereoscopic displays provided an affordable tool to peek into a three dimensional data space.

We present a low-cost immersive visualization environment that makes use of a smart-phone, a game controllers and Google cardboard. This simple equipment allows you to explore your data more natively by flying through your data space. The presented software consists of a central server application running on a computer and a client implementation performing the rendering on multiple smart-phones, enabling users to inspect the data jointly. As the server application uses the VO simple application messaging protocol (SAMP), it is seamlessly integrated with other VO tools, like topcat or aladin. Access the data in the usual way and employ Virtual Observatory Virtual Reality (VOVR) to explore it.

Poster Download:

adass2015.pdf

Client Download:

Android client vovr.apk (50MB)
Configuration file vovr.cfg

Windows client windows.zip (44MB)
Linux client linux.zip (56MB)
MacOS client mac.zip (56MB)

Server Download:

VOVR server vovr.zip (2.6MB)

VOVR sources source.zip (0.1MB)

VOVR java api documentation javadoc.zip (0.5MB)

external jar files externalJars.zip (4.6MB)

Switch to the German homepage or stay on this page