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Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Multi-Surface Interaction

This is a completed project.

Square Kilometer Array

Background

The Square Kilometer Array Project (SKA) is a global science and engineering project to build the world’s largest radio telescope. When it is fully operational, it will generate 10.85 terabytes of raw data per second. This data must be processed by a supercomputer to filter out noise and then it must be visualized in some way. There already exists tools to visualize this data, but we wanted to see if it made sense to interact with this data with multiple devices simultaneously and to use the cloud to support this interaction.

Multi-Surface Interactions

With this project, we are combining multiple technologies into a single interaction. We are using a Kinect for Windows, Microsoft Surface, a digital tabletop, and a wall display together to interact with the data generated. This data is 3 dimensional data. The Kinect is used to gather depth data, and this depth navigates through the z plane. The active z plane is shown on the tablet, tabletop, and Wall Display.

Microsoft Surface Tablet is used as a remote. You can pause the image slicing so you can inspect the current slice further and zoom to a certain region of the image shown. 

The tabletop is used to gather visualization parameters to be sent to the cloud. These parameters change how the visualization looks.

The Wall Display we are using is a 9600 by 3600 pixel resolution display. We use this to display high resolution images without scaling the images.

Cloud Integration

The cloud is used to generate the images from a data file. These images are sent to the client devices and stored in a local cache.