Wissenschaftliche Publikationen

Interaktive 3D-Zeugnisse stellen einen neuartigen Ansatz für die Herstellung von und den Zugang zu Erinnerungen an den Holocaust dar. Dabei ist das Wissen über die Entwicklung, Funktion oder mögliche Nutzung dieser Technologie noch vergleichsweise gering. Im deutschsprachigen Projekt „Lernen mit digitalen Zeugnissen“ (LediZ) an der LMU München werden der Entstehungsprozess und die Interaktion mit digitalen 3D-Zeugnissen genauer untersucht. Die Beiträge in diesem Band stellen Überlegungen zu den Kommunikationsstrukturen interaktiver digitaler 3D-Zeugnisse an und beleuchten weitere Aspekte und Problemstellungen dieses Formats aus unterschiedlichen wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven. Ziel des Bandes ist es, einen Einblick in Entwicklung und Erforschung interaktiver 3D-Zeugnisse von Holocaust-Überlebenden zu geben.

@misc{epub75070,
          editor = {Anja Ballis and Markus Gloe and Florian Duda and Fabian Heindl and Ernst H\"uttl and Daniel Kolb and Lisa Schwendemann},
          volume = {1},
           title = {Interaktive 3D-Zeugnisse von Holocaust-\"Uberlebenden},
            year = {2021},
             url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-75070-9}
}

Conversations with Holocaust survivors are an integral part of education at schools and universities as well as part of the German memory culture. The goal of interactive stereoscopic digital Holocaust testimonies is to preserve the effects of meeting and interacting with these contemporary witnesses as faithfully as possible. These virtual humans are non-synthetic. Instead, all their actions, such as answers and movements, are pre-recorded. We conducted a preliminary study to gauge how people perceive this first German-speaking digital interactive Holocaust testimony. The focus of our investigation is the ease-of-use, the accuracy and relevance of the answers given as well as the authenticity and emotiveness of the virtual contemporary witness, as perceived by the participants. We found that digital 3D testimonies can convey emotions and lead to enjoyable experiences, which correlates with the frequency of correctly matched answers.

@misc{epub75070,
          editor = {Anja Ballis and Markus Gloe and Florian Duda and Fabian Heindl and Ernst H\"uttl and Daniel Kolb and Lisa Schwendemann},
          volume = {1},
           title = {Interaktive 3D-Zeugnisse von Holocaust-\"Uberlebenden},
            year = {2021},
             url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-75070-9}
}

We describe a novel, scalable approach for scientific visualization in HPC environments, based on the ray tracing engine Intel® OSPRay associated with VisIt. Part of the software stack of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, this method has been applied to the visualization of the largest simulations of interstellar turbulence ever performed, produced on SuperMUC-NG. The hybrid (MPI + Threading Building Blocks) parallelization of OSPRay and VisIt allows efficient scaling up to about 150 thousand cores, making it possible to visualize the data at the full, unprecedented resolution of 100483 grid elements (about 23 TB per snapshot).

Besides presenting the method, its HPC context and future developments, we describe the implications of our visualization in the considered science case: our work brilliantly showcases the stretching-and-folding mechanisms through which astrophysical processes drive turbulence and amplify the magnetic field in the interstellar gas, and how the first structures, the seeds of newborn stars are shaped by this process. We finally observe the similarities between ray tracing and other HPC numerical techniques used in astrophysics, anticipating increasing convergences in the near future.

@article{cielo2021visualizing,
  title={Visualizing the world’s largest turbulence simulation},
  author={Cielo, Salvatore and Iapichino, Luigi and G{\"u}nther, Johannes and Federrath, Christoph and Mayer, Elisabeth and Wiedemann, Markus},
  journal={Parallel Computing},
  volume={102},
  pages={102758},
  year={2021},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

@inproceedings{epub71976,
       booktitle = {Enviroinfo 2019},
           title = {Raising Awareness for Endangered Species using Augmented Reality},
          author = {Lea Weil and Daniel Kolb and Jens Weism\"uller and Eric Imm and Dieter Kranzlm\"uller},
            year = {2019},
             url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-71976-6}
}

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging and powerful tool to visualize and explore complex scientific data sets in an intuitive, interactive and user-friendly manner. In this study, we explore the usage of VR to create an immersive visualization of hydrological extreme events based on climate simulations. We aim to make use of the added values of VR to promote the communication of scientific results on potential natural hazards to the public. The visualization data are taken from climate simulations within the ClimEx project, which is an international collaboration between research facilities, universities and public water agencies in Bavaria and Quélbec. The project investigates the effects of climate change on meteorological and hydrological extreme events and implications for water management in the two regions. Within this project, an ensemble of 50 transient runs of the regional climate model CRCM5 were run at approximately 11 km spatial resolution for two domains in Europe and North America from 1950 to 2100. As each of these runs is initialized with only slightly altered starting conditions, this ensemble can be interpreted as modelled natural variability. From this data set, we extracted precipitation data regarding one historical flooding event, the Pentecost flood in Southern Germany and Austria in May 1999, as well as precipitation data for two designated future intense rainfall events in the 2060s and 2080s for the same region. Data for these three extreme rainfall events were visualized in VR using a 3D representation of topography of the region of interest as the background. This VR representation was enhanced with satellite images (on top of the topography), points of interest (for easier navigation) and images of the historic Pentecost flood event (for emphazising the impact of the flood event). We will present the necessary steps to create this immersive virtual reality 3D visualization from the raw scientific data and discuss several aspects of the visual design and the adopted user interface.

@inproceedings{epub76061,
            year = {2019},
         keyword = {Virtual Reality; Environmental Computing; Scientific Visualisation; Climate simulation},
          author = {Daniel Kolb and Wolfgang Kurtz and Jens Weism\"uller and Alexander von Ramm and Ralf Ludwig and Dieter Kranzlm\"uller},
           title = {Using virtual reality to visualize extreme rainfall events derived from climate simulations},
       booktitle = {EGU General Assembly 2019},
             url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-76061-4}
}

Due to the size of its customer base the video game industry has long been the best-funded proponent of innovative real-time computer graphics. Many advancements in the field of computer graphics, software and hardware, have become cost-effective due to their use in video games, which in turn funded even further research and breakthroughs. Recent changes in the monetization of commercial game engines made their use in less revenue driven institutions affordable and, hence, possible. This allows us, given suitable hardware, to build and run computationally expensive fully interactive real-time visualizations at a fraction of the cost and time. We can thus investigate and explore the data in our virtual reality application far sooner. Additionally, we are able to spend more time to iteratively refine the user interaction as well as the preprocessing of the raw scientific data. We supply our visualization with the output data of ClimEx’ computational run on the SuperMUC. ClimEx is a research project that studies the effects of climate change on meteorological and hydrological extreme events. It features a multitude of climate-relevant variables and observes the time span between 1950 and 2100. For our use case we chose to compare three different precipitation events. Each event consists of simulated 60 hours of rainfall data anteceding a potential 100-year flood, which is a flood event that has an annual exceedance rate of 1%. The first event draws from historical data and represents the rain leading up to the 1999 Pentecost flood. We compare these data with two computer generated prospective events, which take place in 2060 and 2081, respectively. Since we wish to gain knowledge on strong local extrema as well as the comprehensive overall trend of the attributes, we chose to display the data in virtual reality. The virtually unlimited number of perspectives and points of view simplify investigating and understanding the three-dimensional data. We are also able to place the observer at the center of the data and empower them to interact with and steer the visualization in intuitive ways. By utilizing a tool like virtual reality, we are able to create an immersive, interactive and engaging user experience, which further facilitates the user’s ability to focus on the visual display and extract information from the displayed data. This allows users, especially non-expert users, to grasp the data we present in our visualization with less effort. In our paper we present the necessary steps to create an immersive virtual reality 3D visualization from raw scientific data based on our use case. This entails several aspects of pre-processing, a simple, suitable user interface as well as our solutions to the challenges we encountered.

@inproceedings{epub71909,
            year = {2018},
         keyword = {Environmental Computing; Virtual Reality; Scientific Visualisation},
         address = {Aachen, Germany},
       publisher = {Shaker Verlag GmbH},
           pages = {39--45},
          editor = {Hans-Joachim Bungartz and Dieter Kranzlm\"uller and Volker Weinberg and Jens Weism\"uller and Volker Wohlgemutz},
          author = {Daniel Kolb and Wolfgang Kurtz and Jens Weism\"uller and Alexander von Ramm and Ralf Ludwig and Dieter Kranzlm\"uller},
           title = {Visualization of climate simulation data in virtual reality using commercial game engines},
       booktitle = {Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd EnviroInfo conference},
             url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-71909-7}
}