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Jisc Tags: disruptiveInnovation;progressPosts;rapidInnovation;VRERI;JISC;BlogMyData
It's well known that creating animations of scientific data creates compelling visualizations that can greatly aid understanding and lead to discoveries. Our first prototypes of the BlogMyData system revealed through user feedback (see First user feedback) that the capability to create animations, annotate them and share them with colleagues, could be a real "win" for the project. Therefore we've spent more time than we originally anticipated on streamlining the whole process of dealing with animations in the system.
The Godiva2 system (the visualization front-end) natively generates animations as animated GIFs, but these have many shortcomings, notably a lack of ability to control the speed of the animation in the browser: a frame-by-frame advance/rewind capability would be very important to users (see Frame-by-frame animations on the web?). We have been experimenting with many possibilities, including producing AVIs for download and using the latest HTML5 features in modern browsers. But this is still under active investigation - if we can crack this problem and make a really nice, streamlined environment for users to quickly create and annotate animations it will be an excellent result for the project. Variability between browsers is currently a major stumbling block- perhaps we are a year or two ahead of time in our ambitions.
Note that we can't tolerate any lossiness in compression, which rules out many animation formats, e.g. MPEG. Producing Flash videos is another possibility, but many Flash movie players are designed for streamed movies, not frame-by-frame scientific videos. (Also, Flash will not work on devices we're keen to target, notably the iPad.)
Jisc Tags: disruptiveInnovation;progressPosts;rapidInnovation;VRERI;JISC;BlogMyData
It's well known that creating animations of scientific data creates compelling visualizations that can greatly aid understanding and lead to discoveries. Our first prototypes of the BlogMyData system revealed through user feedback (see First user feedback) that the capability to create animations, annotate them and share them with colleagues, could be a real "win" for the project. Therefore we've spent more time than we originally anticipated on streamlining the whole process of dealing with animations in the system.
The Godiva2 system (the visualization front-end) natively generates animations as animated GIFs, but these have many shortcomings, notably a lack of ability to control the speed of the animation in the browser: a frame-by-frame advance/rewind capability would be very important to users (see Frame-by-frame animations on the web?). We have been experimenting with many possibilities, including producing AVIs for download and using the latest HTML5 features in modern browsers. But this is still under active investigation - if we can crack this problem and make a really nice, streamlined environment for users to quickly create and annotate animations it will be an excellent result for the project. Variability between browsers is currently a major stumbling block- perhaps we are a year or two ahead of time in our ambitions.
Note that we can't tolerate any lossiness in compression, which rules out many animation formats, e.g. MPEG. Producing Flash videos is another possibility, but many Flash movie players are designed for streamed movies, not frame-by-frame scientific videos. (Also, Flash will not work on devices we're keen to target, notably the iPad.)