Partiview Universe-Simulation Software

An anonymous submitter writes "The August 2002 edition of Sky and Telescope magazine has an article on universe-simulation freeware from the Hayden Planetarium in NYC. Here's the headline to the article: "Master of the Universe: Initially designed to power New York City's premier planetarium, the most detailed universe-simulation software is now available for your PC - for free. By David L. Chandler" I've already spent a few minutes playing with the Milkyway database and found it to be extremely cool."

Not 100% free :-(

[ObviousGuy]

I guess I have to supply my own pot and Pink Floyd music.

Re:Not 100% free :-(

[robslimo]

If the simulation is true to life, all you have to do is wait a few billion years and the pot & Floyd will pop right up on your screen.

Celestia

[MJArrison]

The UI kinda sucks. But if you want one that doesn't a very similar project is Celestia [freshmeat.net].

Re:Celestia

[ditto999999999999999]

celestia is incredible. thanks for the link.

Not sure I'd call it universe simulation software

[dpp]

From the "What is Partiview?" [haydenplanetarium.org] page:

Partiview (Particle View) is a software package that allows one to navigate through three dimensional data sets. These data sets are not limited to astronomical data, but can be particle data of any type. Partiview is also able to display 2-D images as well as play prerecorded flight paths.

So, I'm not sure how you can call it "universe-simulation software" - it's visualisation software for 3-d data sets, which don't even have to be astronomical in nature. It doesn't actually do any simulation of the physical processes in the universe, as far as I can see.

That's not to belittle it - I find being able to visualise data is one of the most important aspects of research.

Here is what it is:

[Elazro]

Here's a little history on partiview:
Partiview started life as part of a project called Virtual Director
at the National Center for Supercomputing. Partiview is a data
visualization tool, not a simulator -i.e. the universes you explore
in Partiview are created beforehand, usually from astronomical observation
or from a supercomputer simulation. It is not restricted to
astronomical or cosmological data either, as a previous poster noted.
The author (and continuing developer) is Stuart Levy of the NCSA,
with documentation provided by Peter Teuben.

Partiview does have many features that aid in visualizing stellar
dynamics, such as locating interacting groups (stars, galaxies, or
other cosmological structure), viewing star trails, and providing
differential rotation for galaxies. It can also incorporate
(precomputed) isosurfaces into a scene.

The viz code in Partiview is also used in Virtual Director (created
by Marcus Thiebaux, maintained by Stuart Levy), which is a
collaborative choreography tool designed to be used in immersive
virtual environments, originally only for SGI CAVE systems.
The Parti code is the real-time renderer we use to set up camera shots
(or "paths"). Later, we take the paths and feed them into a high-
quality off-line renderer to create wonderfully smooth animations.
The virdir/parti combo has been used to create the IMAX film "Cosmic
Voyage", planetarium shows (such as at Hayden), and some TV shows -
most recently the Discovery Channel show "Unfolding Universe", which
started airing this month.

However, using Virtual Director while running a CAVE simulator on
a desktop is extremely difficult (you have to control 12 degrees
of freedom with a 2D mouse). Therefore Stuart wrote the Partivew
standalone executable to be able to develop his particle
visualization code without going nuts trying to control the thing,
and since then, Partiview has become a nice tool. It is, however,
an industrial strength tool, and many of the interesting features
are accessed via the command line (thus reading the manual is probably
useful).

I could say a lot more about Virtual Director, and Partiview - (I am
writing a new, cross platform version of Virtual Director. Or, at
least I'm supposed to be, but I seem to be posting to /. instead).
But if you are interested, look at the milkyway model. If the model
is the same as the one were using here, it's made up of about 20
different datasets - from the Milky Way itself (extrapolated from
a kindred Galaxy) to the Hiparcos data set ( observed locations of
about 15k of our nearest stellar naighbors) and simulation of
interstellar matter, I believe.
(One tiny note - on the AMNH page, they seem to imply that they
are the sole developer and distributer of Partiview. Partiview
is still mainly an NCSA project,

In case documentation isn't provided, you can find it at:
http://bima.astro.umd.edu/nemo/amnh/partiview .html .

-matt