We present CosmoScout VR -a modular 3D Solar System for interactive exploration and presentation of large space mission datasets. This paper describes the overall architecture as well as several core components of the framework. To foster the application in various scientific domains, CosmoScout VR employs a plugin-based architecture. This not only reduces development times but also allows scientists to create their own data visualization plugins without having to modify the core source code of CosmoScout VR. One of the most important plugins -level-of-detail terrain rendering -is described in greater detail in this paper. Another key feature of CosmoScout VR is the scene graph which is tightly coupled with NASA's SPICE library to allow for high-precision positioning of celestial objects, such as planets, moons, and spacecrafts. SPICE is also used for the seamless navigation throughout the Solar System in which the user automatically follows the closest body. During navigation, the virtual scene is scaled in such a way, that the closest celestial body is always within arm's reach. This allows for simultaneous exploration of multiple datasets in their spatial context at diverse scales. However, the navigation uses all six degrees of freedom which can induce motion sickness. In this paper, we present some counter measures as well as evaluate their effectiveness in a user study. CosmoScout VR is open source, cross-platform, and while it can run on conventional desktop PCs, it also supports stereoscopic multi-screen systems, such as display walls, DOMEs or CAVEs.

The development of interactive visualization applications that are applicable to many real-world problems is a challenging affair. For every new project, developers need to follow the same repetitive steps of fetching the raw data, transforming the data into processable form, defining visual structures and then displaying them appropriately. To accelerate this, we propose the Versatile Visual Analytics Framework for Exploration and Research (VVAFER). VVAFER is planned to be an extensible visual analytics framework, upon which different applications can be developed with minimum overload at the development side. Through modular architecture, unified data formats, reusable templates and software components, developers will be able to quickly deploy and create their visualization applications by configuring existing templates with their own specific functionalities. In this paper, we describe our motivation for this future framework and its architectural design.