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MOJOWORLDS: CREATING NEW WORLDS OF OPPORTUNITY FOR TEACHING EARTH SCIENCE TO STUDENTS
QTVR is a QuickTime 5.0 Cubic Virtual reality file movie. This "bubble-world" allows you to spin your perspective in 360°. It starts with 6 images on the faces of a cube that are then digitally stitched and warped into a "bubble" with you at the center. Requires Apple's QuickTime 5.0 plug-in for web browser viewing.
Click on these images to see the QTVR rendering of different digital worlds known as Mojoworlds©. Once QuickTime launches, drag you mouse around the planet! These files are rather large (up to 8 MB) so you'll want to do this from a T1 internet connection!
This bizarre planetoid, Mysterion, is an example of what can happen when Moore's law of CPU processing power finally catches up with the dreams of digital artists. The time required to calculate all of these image blocks would have been prohibitive just five years ago. But as computers have gotten faster, the combination of cool math and hot technology has allowed for stunning special effects by Hollywood. Bobby Crotty '02 worked on our initiative to create a series of worlds that can be distributed over the internet as free downloads to earth science and astronomy students and read by the free Transporter© software created by Pandromeda Software.
The animated movie at right took overnight on a fast machine to render or create. A night-time flight over snow-covered peaks of an earth-like planet. Students will be able to race around their planets and greet the dawn on the other side! Because the actual files for the entire planets are based on fractals, they are quite small (200-500 kB) and are easily shared via email.
Bobby is applying his advanced math topics to create nested functions that manipulate the underlying matrices used to describe surfaces built out of a polygon mesh. Mojoworld© then implements the functions involving fractals, noise, and turbulence to create highly realistic digital worlds for other students to investigate. The results of the processes of glaciation, erosion, volcanic activity, and mountain-building will all be able to observed in real-time.
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