Spacetime Diagram for the Collision of 2 Black Holes (Pair of Pants)VRML File or OpenInventor File (1.3 Mb)
VRML File or OpenInventor File Downsampled (0.5 Mb)
The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is a state-of-the-art developing standard for describing 3 dimensional scenes across the internet. The NCSA Relativity Group is making a concerted effort to use VRML to distribute information about our simulations. Here, you will links to information on VRML and some VRML files of our own.
Here, we present 5 VRML files ready for you to browse (if you have the software capable of doing so). These are all images of our simulations, either of gravitational waves or of colliding black holes, or other stuff too.New!: Some of these datasets have been downsampled to accomadate users with less graphic-intensive workstations. The full sized ones are designed to do about 5-10fps on an Indy, and the downsampled ones should do quite a bit better.
Spacetime Diagram for the Collision of 2 Black Holes (Pair of Pants)
VRML File or
OpenInventor File (1.3 Mb)
VRML File or
OpenInventor File Downsampled (0.5 Mb)
This is the infamous Pair of Pants diagram, the spacetime diagram
of the embedding of the Event Horizon of the collision of 2 black holes.
For more info, see
The Event Horizon project page. Note, due to
downsampling, there appears to be a hole at the coalescence point. This
is a graphical effect only
Slices of a 3-D Teukolsky Wave Evolution
VRML File or
OpenInventor File (1.1 Mb)
VRML File or
OpenInventor File Downsampled (57 kb)
These are Teukolsky waves evolved using our 3-D General Relativity Code.
For more information on 3-D Gravity Waves, see
the 3D-Waves projects page
Isosurfaces 3-D Teukolsky Wave Evolution.
VRML File or
OpenInventor File (1.4 Mb)
VRML File or
OpenInventor File Downsampled (124 kb)
The red surface
represents negative amplitudes while a blue surface represents
positive amplitudes.
Metric from the collision of 2 Black Holes (just one hole for now)
VRML File or
OpenInventor File (14 kb)
From the 3D Code also. For more information, see
the 3D Black Hole projects page.
Gas surrounding a galaxy cluster.
The isosurface is used to show the baryonic density of the gas cloud.
The color mapped onto the isosurface is the temperature of the gas
cloud where it intersects the isosurface. This model was created
from work by members of the Cosmology
Grand Challenge (GC3) on structure formation in the universe.
Since we are testing VRML, and it is still an emerging standard, we are serving both OpenInventor files and VRML files. We have configured our web server to send VRML files with MIME type x-world/x-vrml and OpenInventor files as application/x-inventor (for a lack of anything better to call it!). Thus, if you have ivview (eg, you are working on an SGI) or webspace, you can put the following in your .mailcap, and you should be able to access these links.
# For Jean-Luc VRML application/x-inventor; ivview %s x-world/x-vrml; webspace %s
There are 3 important web sites containting information on VRML. Each is described in their own words.
Credits for the simulations are as follows.