Explorative, Immersive Visualization of Space Weather Phenomena

Abstract

Interactive data exploration represents a key challenge for both the analysis and visualization pipelines in various domains, due to the exponential growth of the data generated by modern sensors. Thanks to recent advances in high-performance computing, processing large-scale data becomes feasible, but the visualization and interactive exploration of such data remain an open challenge. While exploring multi-dimensional data on two-dimensional displays has been a research topic for decades, technologies such as virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) now allow us to leverage the third dimension and explore three-dimensional data in its spatial context, using immersive analytics, which is seen as an emerging research field and key to support analytical reasoning and decision making. Some modern visualization tools are already exploiting VR and AR to enhance data visualization and exploration, but many existing solutions are limited in functionality, immersivity, or usability. There are several challenges to overcome when developing immersive experiences. In this paper, we present an approach for explorative, immersive visualization of space weather phenomena. The main goal of this work is to define a pipeline that starts from the output of a space weather simulation (e.g., coming from ENLIL or EUHFORIA models), and executes a data preparation step in which the data is reduced to the specific needs of a given visualization tool. This post-processed data is visualized by two distinct visualization tools: one targeting domain experts, and the latter targeting the general public. The final objective of this activity is to provide tools for helping experts interpret complex space weather phenomena, and raising awareness for space weather conditions and their effects on our life on Earth, in the general public.