[FRIAM] PSC Tornado Visualization (2008) [720p] - YouTube

[Steven A Smith]

Edward Angel wrote:
> Look at Donna Cox’s site at
> NCSA http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/who-we-are/team/donna-cox-director
>
> She’s been doing tornado simulations for over 15 years. We worked with
> her to put the simulation in planetarium dome. It’s much more
> impressive when you put the viewer in the middle of the tornado and
> immersed in it in the planetarium.

Or viewing it inside a 3+sided CAVE with Stereo and head tracking!   It
was also (all) a lot more impressive when it was new... it was a
significant early example of marrying fairly serious data/model Viz and
high-quality (at that time) rendering for proper 3D spaces.

That said, I think this is a worthwhile discussion... though it is one
I've been involved in (on both sides of the presumed contention) for
decades ( think the term Scientific Visualization was coined in the
mid/late 80s?) with limited resolution.

One person's eye-candy is anothers' significant "aid to
intuition/perception/analysis".   Somewhere in between are shades of
this with "communication graphics" falling closer to "eye-candy" and
highly technical diagrams, charts and graphs aiding in detailed analysis
on the other end.   In the middle (though I don't really believe it is a
single dimensional spectrum) are techniques and renderings which are
more useful for things  like getting peers up to speed quickly (also
communication but more demanding), to gaining novel (or quick) insight
into obscured mechanisms, or simply conveniences of/for construction
like Gnomonic map projections for navigational charts (so that great
circle routes render as straight lines).

When Hollywood first discovered computer graphics (or when it embraced
it fully by taking over the lion's share of the SIGGRAPH conferences) it
lead to a disservice to it's highly effective use in Eng/Sci.   I have
nothing against high fidelity gaming/FX,  it is tres-cool to drop in to
the alternate realities of Tron or Lawnmower Man or Virtuosity or
Battlezone or Riven or Myst or Toy Story (and infinity and beyond! 
25-40 years stale here) but the magic of getting past the uncanny valley
is more of a "technical trick" than anything fundamental leading toward
better understanding of "life the universe and everything".  

mumble,

 - Steve