Developers – 12/12 and 12/19/2013

Thursday, December 12, 3-4pm: Judy, Jenny, Kendra
Kendra reported on her meeting with Christoph (Skype, 12/2).  He wants to visualize wind speed and direction from the Sonic and Sodar data (Jerilyn’s thesis) at Primet and McRae – 96 nights.  He would like the data superimposed on a 3D map of the site.  These are two towers approximately 6 kilometers apart, with data  averaged over 10 meter vertical increments from 15 meters to 395 meters above ground level, and aggregated into 5-minute averages. We talked about how she would visualize the data (as arrows?), and about the spatial scale (since 6 km distance would dwarf the 395 m tower height).
Christoph’s CAREER grant web page has a cartoon with an idea for visualization, as well as good references.  Jerilyn’s thesis will soon be posted, and she will also reorganize her  data on the VISTAS fileshare for more intuitive access and walk Kendra through it.  Kendra (Jenny, Vir, and Kirsten) all have access to that fileshare, as well as all Evergreen project participants.  We look forward to more of Kendra’s work!  See also 12/6 draft of Kendra’s thesis.

Thursday, December 19, 3-4pm:   Judy, Mike, Vir, Nik, Kendra, Justin, Dani

Purpose of today’s meeting was to 1) discuss with Vir and Nik status of their development, and propose dates to meet in Corvallis with collaborators to demo and deliver what has been done, and seek feedback.  We also brainstormed with Dani about how to get started on her project.

Outcome:  We will work to set up meetings on Friday, February 7, asking collaborators John and Bob to walk us through some of the visualizations they have done with VISTAS, and to tell us what is working well and what not, and give suggestions.   Nik and Vir will also update them on their development.  Subsequent to that session, we will tentatively meet with Margaret Burnett (HCI expert and VISTAS CSAB) to review with us the VISTAS UI.  Her feedback will be helpful to Justin whose project is a friendlier UI and who might have specific questions for Margaret.  If Dani has specific questions ready about color and extruded volume (vetted by other developers in January) she would have an opportunity to ask John.  If Kendra has a mockup of ideas for Christoph’s visualization,  we could discuss that, and perhaps meet also with Christoph.   Perhaps these sessions (or a debrief following them) could take the place of an all hands February meeting?

Nik has been busy with other CBI projects since the retreat, and so won’t have much new to show collaborators in January.By February 6, he might have “save projects across sessions” working.  His next project would be to work on “2D – map any fields to X/Y“, and that will require some discussion with collaborators as to what the UI for it would look like;  maybe he could mock up some ideas and get their feedback?   Nik has been working on “behind the scenes” development to refactor the VISTAS Core (needed to make development more straightforward).  To assure thread-safe programming, he is removing auto reference counting (not needed for most VISTAS classes);  ViObject base class will become a ViEventHandler class.

Vir is currently working with John and Patrick on the VISTAS backend to ENVISION effort.  He is writing a new data plugin to read ENVISION data from memory (rather than from a file, as it does now).  For now, the visualization created is static (i.e., from a completed ENVISION simulation), but should easily morph into a dynamic visualization that would update as ENVISION executes.

Dani is researching the use of color, opacity, saturation to enhance some existing visualizations, in particular for ENVISION.  Vir walked us through Bolte’s web site and how to access files from the 4 study areas for which he has successfully visualized simulations (and created 3D shape files), i.e., Central Oregon, Eugene, Big Wood Basin, and WW 2100.  He also suggested that Dani reference shapelib.maptools.org.  Dani will read Guzy 2008, Schultz 2012, Schultz master’s thesis, Kendra’s proposal and thesis, and continue her research on color, opacity and saturation.