3DAVis

At present, astronomers are struggling to shift from 2D to 3D visualisation while keeping the same efficiency and performance. The current 3D visualisation tools available have multiple limitations such as CPU-only rendering or unable to processing large data cubes. Improved software designs are required to maintain applications’ performance and user experience when dealing with large datasets. This project presents the development of 3DAVis, a system that renders astronomical data into 3D visualisation, using a client-server hybrid approach using VTK rendering. Its goal serves as a proof of concept for future 3D astronomical data visualization tools, where the computationally intensive tasks are handled by the server and the data exploration are handled by the client. Overall, the server design achieved high disk reading speeds and acceptable image encoding speeds. ZFP compression also showed great promise as the data transfer proved to be around 20 times faster as it reduces data size streamed across by over 90%. The processing time that the client requires vary in proportion to the amount of data in a O(n) manner. Also, the time that the client requires to perform the combination of data cubes increases exponentially with each additional data cube. In conclusion, this architecture proves to be a very viable system for 3D visualisation which no other current open-source visualisation tools have explored yet. It is essential to note that this prototype is not a fully robust deployable system, but as a proof of concept, this project achieved its desired goals and yield quite positive results.