Interactive Visualization of Parameterized Atmospheres in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) developed a scientific planetary renderer to display and analyse terrain data collected from past and ongoing planetary space exploration missions in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. While this renderer supports large datasets (> 1TB) and interactive framerates it lacks a realistic atmosphere. Especially in VR, an atmosphere helps with perceiving distance and allows for judging the relative distance to objects, also known as aerial perspective. This thesis describes the implementation of a realistic atmosphere,fittable to diferent planets using multiple parameters. Due to certain approximations to render the atmosphere in real-time, the result is not completely accurate, but yields a plausible atmosphere. It is based on work by Bruneton and while it is designed to work as an universal plugin, the implementation is based on the planetary renderer provided by the DLR. In addition to the previous work, the parameters are fit to resemble the atmosphere on Mars, as seen on photographs taken by recent Mars-missions. Also a Bloom-Filter is additionally implemented to imitate the behaviour of the human eye or a camera when looking into the sun. The HDR-implementation of Bruneton is extended with the use of another filmic tonemapping operator and further improved by rendering a realistic looking sun. The here presented implementation offers a real-time, parameterizable atmosphere renderer, which is easy to integrate in any planetary rendering engine.