 at NCAR, and I'm joined by Matt Ramey and Nihant Cherakuru, if you guys want to give a wave to the audience. Our job, we work with our NCAR scientists. We help them create animations and visualizations of their science data. And so that's a really fun part of our job. We also research and develop really cool new technologies for education and outreach. And so that's actually what we're gonna be showing you today. So let me share my screen here and get us started. All right, so should have the screen popping up there. So yeah, so one of the cool technologies that we wanna talk to you today about is called augmented reality. And so before we start, let's just talk about a little bit about what is augmented reality? And so a really simple definition is that augmented reality is taking computer-generated content, like images or objects or just even labels and overlaying them on top of a real-world video to provide additional information or even for entertainment. And so probably one of the most recognizable examples of augmented reality is a game called Pokemon Go. A lot of you have probably heard about this. It became popular in 2016. And you use your mobile device to battle virtual creatures. So it's a really fun game to play. But there's a lot of ways to use augmented reality. Another example, you could be walking down a city street and maybe you point your mobile devices, camera along the street or at a building and you can see what businesses are in that area, where the coffee shops are, maybe a shopping center or something like that. So that's the picture up on the right. On the lower left, another example is for home design. And so maybe you bought a new coffee table and you wanna see what it looks like in your living room. And so you can actually, actually before you buy it, you can actually go in there and put the coffee table in your living room and see what it looks like. So it's a really handy tool to have. What we use it for here at NCAR though, is really to try to create engaging and interesting educational applications, trying to get more people interested in science and understanding the work that we do here. And so in the picture on the lower right, that's a picture that Nihon created. He has a hurricane there right in the middle of a table in our library at NCAR. And so it's a really fun way to look at science and kind of interact with it. And so what are we gonna do today? So really excited to show you a couple of examples of augmented reality that we've been developing at NCAR along with other group members here in our organization. And so Matt's gonna start off by demonstrating some examples of a giant hailstone, a supercomputer that you can put in your living room and even an asteroid impact. So that's gonna be really fun and exciting to look at. And then Nihon is gonna follow up and he's gonna show you an application that he created called Medio AR. And it runs on your mobile device and he'll show you how to explore a bunch of really cool data sets with that. And just a note, if you do wanna try this later on, make sure that you're connected to a Wi-Fi signal so you don't incur any kind of carrier charges on your cell phone. Next slide up. And so Matt's gonna start off with this. This is just a little bit of an example or instruction page. We will be posting the slides for this presentation so you can come back and look at this and see how to work these examples. But if you wanna follow along, you can come to this address up here, this webpage up on the left side of the screen. Or if you have a mobile device handy, you can point your camera to this QR code and it'll take you to the same page. On this page, once you get there, there's several different examples you can click on. If you click on the hailstone example, this page on the right will come up. And if you're just using a web browser, you can use your mouse to kind of rotate the object around, look at more information and additional links lower in the page. If you're using a mobile device though, you'll see this little AR icon pop up in the lower right-hand corner. And if you press on that, it'll actually bring up the virtual object which you can then place in your living room or on a tabletop and you can interact and walk around the object as you like. And so without further ado, I think we'll go ahead and let Matt get started to present his piece of the presentation. Great, thanks, Tim. Yeah, as Tim said, I'm Matt Raimi. I'm a software engineer at NCAR and I do data visualization. So I'm gonna be demoing some of these and this is the first one Tim mentioned, that the hailstone. So if you click on that cube icon on that page and you're on a newer Android or iPhone device, you're gonna see something like this and this is looking at a dining room table. And as you can see from the plaque there, this is a hailstone that actually fell in Vivian, South Dakota in 2010 and eight inches in diameter and almost two pounds. So this is one of the advantages of using AR because you can see I placed it here next to a coffee pot and you can really sense the scale. So this is actually a computer model of that hailstone but if you don't have the real object, you can see how big that is and you can imagine that'd be pretty bad to have that falling out of the sky. So this is one of the great things about AR and I'll go ahead and go to the next video, Tim please and show another advantage of AR. So as you know, the Mesa Labs closed right now. So normally we'd have Super Science Saturday at the Mesa Lab and our section would probably be in the Viz Lab, which is my Zoom background here and we show visualizations and demos in that room. But since you can't go there, you can use AR to see some of the things we have at the lab. And this is an example, this is the Cray 1A supercomputer and it's serial number three. So one of the very first ones, it came out just after the first Star Wars movie in 1977 and it cost almost $9 million, it weighed five and a half tons. It took 30 construction workers, engineers and helpers to move it into the lab. And now your smartphone actually has more computing power than that supercomputer. So it's pretty neat. Once the Mesa Lab opens, you can actually go back and look at this, but for now you can use AR and you can put this in your living room, you can walk around it, you can see just how big it is, see the scale. And I'll go ahead and move on to just one more example here. Another great thing you can do with this is look at datasets. So what we do is we take data from scientists that simulate things like this, for example, it's an asteroid strike. They simulate things on a supercomputer that can't actually have, or you couldn't actually study in real life because this asteroid strike is hitting the ocean and that splash is going up. If you imagine the coffee pot is as tall as Mount Everest, that splash is going up twice as high as Mount Everest. So it's just a huge, huge impact. So we use computer models to study that and then the scientists can take that, they can walk around it and they can look at the details, they can see how, what the scale is and it's just a great way to see your data in the real world. So there's a lot of potential use for augmented reality. So anyway, that's just a quick rundown of a few examples from that page, but there's multiple other examples and we're gonna be adding to it continuously as we get more and more augmented reality content. So I encourage you to check out that page and I think that's all I got. So I'll turn it back over to Tim and Neon. Thank you. Great, thanks Matt, that was great. And again, I'll just reiterate what Matt just said, just try out those, if you wanna go to that website and try those things out on your own, again, you can use your mobile device or if you just have a desktop or a laptop with a web browser, you can also interact with them as well. So we really encourage folks to give that a try. So yeah, so next up is Neon Cherakuru and Neon is gonna demo an application that he developed called Medio AR. It's an augmented reality application that places virtual objects on top of what we call science pages or science sheets. The app runs on iOS or Android devices and you can download those from the Apple or Google Play Store so that you can see that up here, works on both types of devices. And after you do that, then you would need to download and print out these science sheets. That's what you see over here on the left that are being flipped over. You can print those out in either color or black and white. And once you do that, you'll see these little, what we call image markers on each page and it's just a kind of a black box with an image in the center and these little white boxes around it. And so once you start the application, you then point your camera on your mobile device at that image marker and then the virtual object will appear on top of the science page. And you can rotate it around and look at it from different angles and that sort of thing. And so Neon is gonna show us a little example of how that actually works. Hi, everyone. So basically the video that you're watching is a screen capture of my device running the Meteor AR application. And as you can see, I've got some science pages printed out. And when you look at the science pages through the application, you have a 3D image that shows up corresponding to the dataset. And this just shows the different kinds of datasets that we have in the application. So what you're seeing right now is an image of the sun or a video of the sun as photographed through in two different wavelengths. And what we'll do right now is we'll go through one of these datasets and which happens to be one of my favorite. So just moving on. So this dataset is one of my favorites, as I've said earlier, because you get to see like why we have seasons and like what are some changes that cease like when we have seasons. So what you're seeing is basically this quantity that's being represented. So we have 24 hours that represents an average day in each month. So if you look at the gray color bar at the bottom, so that shows you the month. And what we are seeing is like an average day in each month. So right off the bat, if you can see, like you see this section of the earth that keeps rotating. So the darker areas are the areas on the earth that are experiencing night and the brighter areas are places where it's day. Right off the bat, you can see that the duration of day and night is not constant throughout the year. It changes based on where you live as well as which season it is in. And these things are mirror images in the northern and southern hemisphere. So let us say I am a scientist living, I mean I go to the South Pole and I decide to stay there doing some research experiment. You can see that in December when it is winter in the northern hemisphere, it's summer in the southern hemisphere. So I'll have days when the sun wouldn't rise. Similarly, what you're seeing right now in Antarctica near the South Pole, you have days when the sun doesn't rise at all. So it's dark and now it's, you have days when you have like the sun is always there. And this sort of, like using this data set, you can sort of explore this and move the object around and see it from different directions. Now if you're interested, this is not the only data set that we have. So we have some other data sets given in other science sheets. So if you're interested, I would encourage you to like check it out. And I'm curious to know what you folks find. So with that, I'll pass it back to Tim. All right, thank you, Neon. That's really, that's great. And I think one thing I forgot to mention too is that the apps are free. So, you know, feel free to download those and they don't cost you anything to do that as well. So, but do remember to keep your wifi on when you're using it. It'll help you save from incurring any kind of carrier charges. So with that, that's kind of our quick presentation of the kind of the different ways that we're using augmented reality and kind of exploring new technologies and really trying to get a wider audience engaged in what we do. And up here on the screen now is just some of the different links that we talked about earlier in the presentation. But again, you should be able to download the whole presentation later on and have all that information that we talked about. So again, thank you. We're really glad to be part of Super Science Saturday and now we're happy to take any questions if there are any out there. Thank you so much, Tim, Matt and Neon. And in the honor of having Pikachu mentioned during your show, I have my Pikachu on for scale of now it's in the real world. We do have some questions and I'm wondering, Brett, if you can please post up the first question that we have from our audience. And I think it's Evan who was asking a question because you mentioned kind of like video games and Minecraft is one of the video games that is pretty popular out there in the world. And there's a lot of things that kids do to create worlds and virtual reality is everywhere, virtual reality in our life through our phones. That's so amazing. But I do have a question and once it pops up you'll be able to see it if you need to refer back to it. But there was a question from Evan asking, is this like Minecraft Earth? Because it pops your building in the world. Are you guys familiar with Minecraft Earth? I am not. I know of Minecraft. I don't know Minecraft Earth, that's the new one. Yeah, like I've actually seen pictures of it and it's pretty cool. In fact, Evan, it is a lot like Minecraft. In fact, we use some of the same technology that is used in Minecraft. So like if you think about data visualizations in three dimensions are a lot like Minecraft too. So in Minecraft you create these blocks, right? And you color it or like you have different options that you can use. So in data visualizations it's the same thing. So remember the hurricane, like if you look at Matt's picture like he has it on the screen behind him, if you were to zoom really close into that hurricane you would actually see blocks similar to Minecraft. So think of it like a Minecraft game except that instead of like doing everything artistically we actually use data and computers to paint those different blocks that we put on Earth. Great, thank you so much for tackling that question which leads us to the second question that we have from Jenna, which is how hard is it to make things in augmented reality or AR and virtual reality, VR? Yeah, do you want to take that one or? Yeah, sure. So it used to be really hard in the past like if you go back six, seven years you really had a lot of coding that you had to do. But however we are getting to a point where in like AR VR is getting more interactive and it's more user friendly. So if you know how to model 3D objects or if you have an existing computer model for 3D objects, there is a fairly easy way for you to see it in AR. So I would say it is not as hard as it used to be but if you have some modeling skills like 3D modeling skills you might be able to easily put that model in AR and VR and view it. Neyantha, I'm drawing a blank on the name but what's the name of the Mac application? That you can actually use, I think it's AR to put it. Yeah, it's called Reality Composer and it's released by Apple. So in fact, yeah, that's a good point. So if you have like Reality Composer it allows you to like take any 3D models and put it in and you can preview it like right. It's fairly easily you can put it in your living room and see. Yeah, it's so cool. Yeah, just the reality composer it's really fun too because they have like pre-made objects like rockets and things you can put in and kind of play with and you can launch a rocket in your like like Neyant said in your living room or off a coffee table or something like that. It's a fun little application. And these are virtual rockets. Yes, they are virtual. Great, thank you so much. And if I feel like, you know if there are artists out there or people that love to draw this is definitely a way to get into science in a different way. It doesn't have to be doing all that number crunching but you can do the art part of it too. Is that correct? I was just gonna mention that actually. So when you're creating these 3D objects we're combining math. We're using the scientists data and we're using math to analyze that. And I'm also an artist and we use a lot of art influence. We use a lot of color theory and we color that data and make it accessible to people and make it look good and we're just trying to get that data out there. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, anything you may not need to have all of the computer skills. There might be some tools there that you can use. And if you have an art background or vice versa, if you are more into computer science you can learn about the art and you can start to combine the two. So yeah, it's definitely a very artistic field. This is so great. And I know we're coming close to the 10, 30 hour but we do have two more questions. One of them was, you know what was the name of the application? Is it Medio, like meteorology, AR? Or how do you get to that? Yes, it's METEO and then AR. And so if you go to Google Play or the Apple Store you can just type in that name and search for that name and it'll pop up. Sounds great. Thank you. And then there was a question because you showed like what it looks like the earth is rotating and we had Lydia who's age four. Thank you so much for joining us. She was asking why were the globes spinning in different directions? And I think it's kind of referring to this like AR that kind of pops up when you're looking at your phone but can you answer what was that? What was, why were the earth spinning? Yes, that's a great observation Lydia. So in fact, like I don't think many people would have seen it. So like good, great job on that. I'm quite impressed. So in the videos that you see, I'm assuming you're talking about the northern and southern hemispheres that I showed. So it's not that the globes are spinning in different direction but it's just that we are viewing it differently. So the videos that I've taken on my phone if you imagine the globes spinning the first video was taken from the north pole and the second video would be a mirror image in a way because the globe is still spinning in the same direction however your viewpoint changes. And that's what makes it appear like the globes are spinning in different directions but in general they're not. So if you were to use the application and if you were to spin the earth yourself you can actually get a better sense of what's happening. Thank you so much. And as we say thank you to our presenters, Matt, Tim and Nihonf. I'm wondering Nihonf if you can please show the QR code once again to get the examples and then we'll put that up following this event at 1030 we'll have our next group of speakers but thank you so much for joining us. Nihonf, Tim and Matt and everybody who's out there we'll just show this real quick and then once everybody has an opportunity to see this and these can also be accessed through the NCAR-UCAR website. Is that correct? Actually, well, so Lorena we had shared a link is that possible to put the link up for folks to download the slideshow that would give all the information that probably you'd get it the best way? I think we are recording this so people could definitely re-watch as well. And Tiffany posted it in the Slido as well. Okay and for everybody on Slido if you look at the three bars on the top left of the Slido interface you can click on that and it'll give you options to interact and engage with different, a survey you can give us feedback and check out these different links that we have up on there. Thank you so much everybody and Brett and Paul we're gonna go back to you if you can put up the schedule for the rest of the day and we'll see you back here at 10.30. Thank you.