2016 SCEC Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (USEIT): SCEC-VDO Development & Visualization

Rory C. Norman, Kishan Rajasekhar, Emy S. Huang, Patrick Vanderwall, Allen Y. Shi, Rafael G. Cervantes, Mark L. Benthien, Thomas H. Jordan, FNU Sanskriti, Jozi K. Pearson, John Yu, & Kevin R. Milner

Published August 5, 2016, SCEC Contribution #6525, 2016 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #332

SCEC-VDO (Southern California Earthquake Center Virtual Display of Objects) is a software program which allows users to visualize different sets of earthquake data. SCEC-VDO is developed by interns in Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (USEIT), who add new functionalities to it each year. This year, the SCEC-VDO team was tasked by Thomas Jordan to revamp SCEC-VDO using The Visualization Toolkit (VTK), which replaced the old unsupported Java 3D platform, to visualize 30,000 year catalogues of multiple earthquakes. To visualize these catalogues, a new open source plugin was created to read data files provided by the High Performance Computing (HPC) team, which then can display the rupture events on SCEC-VDO. The most important improvement made to SCEC-VDO is the complete makeover to the timeline plugin and ability to save states of the program. The older version of the timeline plugin was difficult to use. The new timeline allows users to insert key frames which saves the state, such as the camera position, the number of components on the map, the transparency of the components, and the color of the components. This makes it easy for users to make edits when creating their video and renders stable videos, eliminating the need for post video editing. The other plugins that were developed include the Shake Map Plugin, Legend Plugin, and the Hazus Plugin.

Key Words
SCEC-VDO, Earthquake scenarios,Hazard, VTK, Java

Citation
Norman, R. C., Rajasekhar, K., Huang, E. S., Vanderwall, P., Shi, A. Y., Cervantes, R. G., Benthien, M. L., Jordan, T. H., Sanskriti, F., Pearson, J. K., Yu, J., & Milner, K. R. (2016, 08). 2016 SCEC Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (USEIT): SCEC-VDO Development & Visualization. Poster Presentation at 2016 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Communication, Education, and Outreach (CEO)