Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Highly-portable Immersive Virtual Environment,
commonly known throughout the DEVELOP Program as the HIVE,
is a three-walled structure used to project three-dimensional data
and environments for easier understanding to
community partners and policy makers.
Built entirely by students here at DEVELOP
in the Summer of 2009, it is both inexpensive
and portable compared to other visualization systems.
Many of the materials needed for construction,
such as the PVC piping, projection screens,
and short-throw rear projector can be bought
off-the-shelf at a variety of local and online retail stores.
The HIVE can be assembled in about 30 minutes
with at least two team members.
The Ocular Radiant Blackout Inclusive Tent,
otherwise known as the ORBiT,
is an expansion of the HIVE to surround the three projectors
around black-out fabric to increase the brightness
of the visualizations on the HIVE.
In order to construct the ORBiT, additional PVC pipes
and black-out fabric was necessary.
The ORBiT only marginally increases the size
and set-up time of the HIVE, and it allows
the HIVE to be taken to any venue despite lighting restrictions.
The HIVE has been presented to various
top policy-makers and NASA officials
such as Dr. Shawana Johnson and
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr.
One key element of the HIVE is the integration
of the Microsoft Kinect.
The team has been developing an application
using the Microsoft Kinect Software Development Kit
in order to gain access to the raw data streams
of the Kinect and apply it to our visuals on the HIVE.
By using the Kinect, we are able to manipulate
any displayed visual using motion gestures and voice commands.
The Kinect SDK has recently become compatible with multiple languages,
such as Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese.
The HIVE currently incorporates English and Spanish
into its Kinect application,
and other languages will be added in the near-future.
Each term, the HIVE team works closely with
at least one other team to create visualizations
that can be used either on the HIVE, or for other types of presentations.
This Summer, the team worked with the
Alaska Disasters team to visualize ice jams
occurring in the town of Eagle, Alaska
and the affects that it had on its community.
Models of the houses and ice glaciers were
created using Autodesk 3ds Max, while the
visualization itself was built using the Unity3D game engine.
Though the animation is not able to run on the HIVE,
future terms will work towards stabilizing
Unity executable visualizations to properly display on the HIVE.
We also try to create new visuals to
demonstrating our modeling capabilities.
This animation shown is of the CALIPSO, NPP,
and Aquarius satellites orbiting around the Earth.
Each of the satellite models were made using
Autodesk Inventor, and were later imported into
Autodesk 3ds Max for textures and final animation renders.
In future terms, the HIVE team will continue modeling NASA EOS
satellites to incorporate into this visual.
We will also work with other teams who would
like visualizations using any of these satellite models.
Despite the increasing number of visualization systems,
the future of the HIVE is bright.
The team hopes to continue increasing the
HIVE’s user-friendly experience and make improvements to the
structure and computers to be competitive against other systems.
Our goals for future terms is to incorporate more languages
to the HIVE’s Kinect Application, integrate an
Android application for manipulating visuals and
downloading information on said visuals,
and even a complete renovation of the HIVE structure itself.
No matter which road the HIVE takes, it will always
be the leading innovation force of the DEVELOP program.