Exploring and Interrogating Astrophysical Data in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Scientists across all disciplines increasingly rely on machine learning code to analyse the vast quantity of data that is now commonplace, rapidly growing in volume and complexity. As the compelling trends and outliers are identified, careful and close inspection will still be necessary to disentangle the astrophysics from, say, systematics and false positives. It is clearly necessary to migrate to new technologies to facilitate scientific analysis and exploration. Astrophysical data is inherently multi-parameter, with the spatial dimensions at the core of imaging, spectral, time-domain and simulation data. The arrival of mainstream virtualreality (VR) headsets and increased GPU power, as well as the availability of versatile development tools for video games, has enabled scientists to deploy such technology to effectively interrogate and interact with complex multidimensional data. In this paper we present development and results from custom-built interactive VR tools, called the iDaVIE suite, that are informed and driven by research on galaxy evolution, cosmic web large-scale structure, galaxy-galaxy interactions, and gas/kinematics of nearby galaxies in survey and targeted observations. The Era of Big Data ushered in by the SKA and its Pathfinders challenges our storage, calibration, reduction and refinement methods, and it also demands innovative ways to interrogate the data at intuitive -leveraging visual perception -levels necessary for new discovery.

A MeerKAT view of pre-processing in the Fornax A group

“…However, we found some real H i emission below these thresholds that should be included in the detection mask. We thus operated on the detection mask using the virtual reality (VR) software iDaVIE-v (Sivitilli et al 2021) from the Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) Visualisation Lab (Marchetti et al 2020;Jarrett et al 2020). This allowed us to use a ray marching renderer (Comrie et al, in prep.…”

A MeerKAT view of pre-processing in the Fornax A group

“…However, we found some real H i emission below these thresholds that should be included in the detection mask. We thus operated on the detection mask using the virtual reality (VR) software iDaVIE-v (Sivitilli et al in press) from the IDIA Visualisation Lab (Marchetti et al 2020;Jarrett et al 2020). This allowed us to use a ray marching renderer (Comrie et al in prep) to view and interact with our H i cube while making adjustments to the mask within a 3D digital immersive setting.…”

iDaVIE-v: immersive Data Visualisation Interactive Explorer for volumetric rendering

“…To ease the understanding of the tool, in this section we briefly summarise the operations and actions that are currently enabled in the iDaVIE-v beta release and that are thought to serve the Radio Hi astronomical community and its science needs. Any example reported hereafter will thus refer to this specific science case; for a more extensive description on the various scientific applications of the tool we refer the reader to Jarrett et al (2020) • Data import: the desktop GUI. The user can load the data in iDaVie-v using an ad-hoc developed desktop GUI.…”

“…In this paper we illustrate the main capabilities of iDaVIE-v in the astronomical context. For more details on the technical software development and broader reach of iDaVIE-v and of the complete software suite iDaVIE we refer the reader to Sivitilli et al (2019), Marchetti et al (2019) and Jarrett et al (2020).…”