Francis Ray Cristobal
ABSTRACT
The conservation and preservation of coral reefs in the Hawaiian island chain remains one of the critical missions of marine scientists today. A wide variety of visual tools and techniques are utilized to support this mission, but are typically bound to a traditional desktop environment. This project uses applied virtual reality techniques to visualize several coral reefs found throughout the Hawaiian Archipelago. The core of the application involves recasting 3D data into a fully immersive virtual reality environment. A custom user interface is used to support navigation and manipulation of this data.
The 3D content used for the application was derived from a set of photogrammetry models, constructed from high-resolution scans of Pacific coral reefs. The data collection originated with annual research expeditions in collaboration with the NOAA Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to improve the understanding of how habitat structure affects associated reef organisms and large-scale ecological processes. Geospatial analysis was applied to the models in order to quantify and classify characteristics of these underwater habitats.
Supplemental Material
- JHR Burns, D Delparte, RD Gates, and M Takabayashi. 2015. Integrating structure-from-motion photogrammetry with geospatial software as a novel technique for quantifying 3D ecological characteristics of coral reefs. PeerJ 3 (July 2015), e1077. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1077Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- C. Donalek, S. G. Djorgovski, A. Cioc, A. Wang, J. Zhang, E. Lawler, S. Yeh, A. Mahabal, M. Graham, A. Drake, S. Davidoff, J. S. Norris, and G. Longo. 2014. Immersive and collaborative data visualization using virtual reality platforms. In 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). IEEE, Washington, DC, USA, 609–614.Google Scholar
- Mark A. Fonstad, James T. Dietrich, Brittany C. Courville, Jennifer L. Jensen, and Patrice E. Carbonneau. 2013. Topographic structure from motion: a new development in photogrammetric measurement. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 38, 4 (2013), 421–430. https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.3366 arXiv:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/esp.3366Google ScholarCross Ref
- Patrick Millais, Simon L. Jones, and Ryan Kelly. 2018. Exploring Data in Virtual Reality: Comparisons with 2D Data Visualizations. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI EA ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article Paper LBW007, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188537Google ScholarDigital Library
- Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, and Richard Szeliski. 2008. Modeling the World from Internet Photo Collections. International Journal of Computer Vision 80, 2 (01 Nov 2008), 189–210. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-007-0107-3Google ScholarDigital Library
- M.J. Westoby, J. Brasington, N.F. Glasser, M.J. Hambrey, and J.M. Reynolds. 2012. ‘Structure-from-Motion’ photogrammetry: A low-cost, effective tool for geoscience applications. Geomorphology 179(2012), 300 – 314. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2012.08.021Google ScholarCross Ref
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